Cruise Lines, Attractions See Upsides to Serving Travelers With Sensory Disabilities
Photo Credit: The Carnival Freedom, one of the cruise ships certified to be Sensory Inclusive by KultureCity and providing accessibility for guests with sensory disabilities. WikiMedia / Rapidfire
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Inclusion is great, but let's keep in mind that there's more to disabled accommodations than providing a wheelchair. Catering to different types of disabilities makes good business sense.
If you've ever been to a museum, you know the number one rule is to keep your hands to yourself and not touch the displays. But for someone with an invisible or sensory disability, these decades-long practices are more a deterrent than an incentive to visit.
Companies across the travel industry realize they're missing out on revenue by not servicing the invisible disabled community with trillions of dollars in disposable income. How are policies changing to become more inclusive and allow sensory-friendly programming?
Once a month on "Sensory Saturday," the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Southport removes voice recordings throughout the museum, dims the lights, and offers hands-on crafts for visitors with sensory disabilities during the two-hour program.
While many companies offer standard disabled accessibility for people with mobility restrictions, providing these accommodations is important because sensory disabilities restrict how a person perceives or interacts with the world around them. These include anything affecting the five senses, such as blindness or deafness, autism, and hypersensitivity or sensory processing disorders.
Museums and attractions are clearly understanding why would anyone want to spend money on something they or someone in their group can't enjoy? To put it in perspective, in the U.S. alone, 61 million people or one in four are living with a disability, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. Globally, over two billion people have vision impairment, the World Heal
