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Travel for All: Lonely Planet s Accessible Travel Project
Almasalla Arab Travel Portal News – On the International Day of People with Disability, 3rd December 2013, a United Nations–sanctioned day that aims to promote an understanding of people with disability and encourage support for their dignity, rights and well-being, Lonely Planet is proud to share a new project that seeks to make travel possible for more people.
Our core belief is that travel is a force for good when practised responsibly, that travel enriches those who are touched by it either directly or indirectly. Travelling with a disability requires a lot of organisation, but information on accessibility is often hard to find. Around 50% of people with a disability would travel more if they could be sure more accessible facilities were available. With almost a billion people in the world — that’s almost 15% of the world’s population — having a physical, mental or sensory disability, we believe it’s important to ensure their access to travel opportunities is not limited.
What is the aim of Lonely Planet’s Travel for All project?
Our goal is to make Lonely Planet the world’s premier provider of accessible travel information, the first port of call for all accessible travel needs, not only for those with a disability, but for anybody with access issues.
So what exactly do we intend to do?
We believe that this is all about community. Lonely Planet already hosts the world’s largest, most well-known, highly respected and frequented online travel community; we want to extend that to the accessible travel community. There is no group of people better qualified to assess the accessibility of venues than those themselves affected by access issues and none more highly motivated to provide advice and recommendations for their peers. We intend to give our community the platform to share their information and experiences, through our existing Thorn Tree forum, and via social media channels such as Google+, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest.
The first thing we intend to do is listen! Many of you will know or know of someone who may have trouble accessing all the opportunities travel has to offer and we’d like you to let us know what you think we can do to support them. Whether it’s help with planning, advice about how to cope on the road or something else entirely; simply send an e-mail to [email protected] with ‘Travel for All’ in the subject line.
While your ideas flow in, we’ll publish a series of articles on lonelyplanet.com written by people affected by different access issues.
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