Websites on Travel, Tours & Vacations
By Barbara Duncan (bjdnycla@aol.com)
Coincidentally, this issue of Disability World has articles by specialists with disabilities who traveled recently to Japan, as well as an article from Japan about that country's emerging interest in expanding the number of professional travel companies that offer services to disabled tourists.
On March 14 the Colombia News Service, based in the U.S., featured a report on a relatively new service in the travel field: companies that arrange day trips and extended holidays for travelers with cognitive or intellectual disabilities. In response to quite limited and often uninspired programs for outings, Anthony di Salvo founded Sprout Tours (www.gosprout.org) because as he puts it, "Here, we don't do trips that we don't want to go on ourselves." Based on the East Coast, Sprout trips head for television studios or the Catskills or the Bahamas, based on the assumption that developmentally disabled adults want the same change of pace and choice of exotic settings that other travelers or vacationers do. A similar initiative in the Western states, Trips Inc (www.tripsinc.com) was founded by Jim Peterson in Eugene, Oregon, after he became furstrated by the lack of stimulating travel opportunities for developmentally disabled people. Peterson has organized trips to Athens, Mexico, Paris and throughout the U.S.
There are a plethora of websites dedicated to travel for disabled individuals, some aimed at expanding accessible travel in one country, such as Costa Rica or South Africa, others that do outreach to one group such as deaf or blind people or those who use wheelchairs. Recently a few websites have started tracking all the other travel & disability websites, magazines, and information exchanges. The two that seem the most comprehensive are: www.gimponthego.com and www.sath.org. Gimp on the Go tends to have more information for wheelchair users, and features a lot of in-depth articles by savvy travel writers. Sath, the Society for Accessible Travel & Hospitality, has lists of travel agents, lists of resources broken down by disability group and publishes a magazine called Open World. As far as we could find, only one website is dedicated to facilitating the international exchange of accessible apartments and houses for disabled travelers: www.independentliving.org. Finally, Mobility International USA has done the most meticulous research about design and programmatic accessibility of mainstream international exchange and studies programs: www.miusa.org
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