Table of contents

INTRODUCTION

The different categories of tourism professionals considered in this guide will have contact with disabled persons for a limited time period, during which they should be able to understand which kind of disability they are dealing with, what are the abilities the disabled person in front of them can use, to focus on the needs and to react accordingly.

Some contacts will be reiterated (a travel agent getting in touch with his client to conclude the transaction) while others will be over in a few hours and will influence the quality and success of the service as a whole.

On the other hand, tourism professionals are not accessibility experts: they are going to "sell a product" that has already been designed. They should, however, understand what an accessible environment means and what a disabled client could do independently in order to offer him or her the most suitable solution to his/her travelling needs.

One of the major difficulties when people are in contact with people with disabilities is to adjust to the correct attitude. Many persons tend to consider disabled people somehow different from other clients, to have an embarrassed or patronising attitude, to overreact, to try to help at all costs, to regard the disability as affecting the capacity of the person to interact with others NORMALLY.

While considering these difficulties, we may identify some of the possible answers we need in order to provide a quality service, to give disabled clients a "value-for-money" product.

The main aim of this programme is the development of a European modular training reference guide addressing tourism professionals. It will analyse the needs of tourists with disabilities, and provide information on the ways to welcome and accommodate them appropriately in the tourist structures.

This reference guide, based on the real and specific needs of tourists with disabilities, should be considered a recommendation at European level in the training of tourism professionals - a training in which people with disabilities themselves should be actively involved as trainers.

With this project, we aim to reach a general awareness among tourism professionals about the specific needs of disabled tourists and favour the free circulation of these people as well as their participation in tourist activities in their chosen destinations.

The training reference guide and the educational material mentioned above are addressed to:
tourism schools and the tourism industry as a whole. In this way, it will be possible to include the methods of analysis of the needs of people with disabilities in the standard tourism training seminars.