Biography

Jillian Rickly is a Professor of Tourism at the University of Nottingham, Head of the Department of Marketing, Tourism and Analytics, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Annals of Tourism Research. She earned her PhD in Geography from Indiana University and has nearly two decades of experience with interdisciplinary social science pedagogy in both US and UK higher education systems.
Jillian has spent much of her career investigating the role of authenticity/alienation in tourism motivation and experience, contributing significantly to the theoretical development and philosophical depth of this area. In recent years, Jillian has built a research agenda around accessible tourism and more-than-human accessibility. She co-edited the first Handbook of Accessible Tourism (2025, De Gruyter) and has worked with a number of organizations to translate accessible tourism research into real world impact, including Guide Dogs for the Blind Association, Assistance Dogs UK, and Responsible Travel.

Abstract

We study online informal lending among anonymous individuals conducted without contracts, collateral, or legal enforcement. Accessible tourism aims to provide seamless experiences across the tourism sector to a full range of consumers, including people with disabilities, ageing populations, and cross-generational families, through the reduction and/or mitigation of attitudinal, informational, and physical barriers. Assistance dogs undergo extensive training to carry out a range of tasks that support people with disabilities to achieve greater independence. However, tourists with assistance dogs remain among the least researched and least catered for segments of the accessible tourism market. This presentation shares the findings of a study conducted in partnership with Assistance Dogs UK and Guide Dogs for the Blind on the travel behaviour of people with disabilities who have an assistance dog, the barriers and constraints to tourism participation, and implications for assistance dog welfare. It puts forward the concept of more-than-human accessibility in an effort to attend to (1) the unique anti-discrimination rights of people with disabilities that include assistance dogs as part of reasonable accommodation; (2) the human-assistance dog bond that functions as an affective relationality of cross-species interdependence; (3) the extension of interpersonal constraints on the travel behaviour of people with disabilities to include non-human relations; and (4) the welfare needs of assistance dogs whose work requires them to accompany their human partner on holiday.

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