Breaking down barriers

The World Health Organization estimates one in six of the world’s population experiences significant disability. Yet so daunting is the prospect of taking a business trip, “in many cases employees with disabilities just avoid travel and all the associated benefits and opportunities it gives,” said a travel manager for a global tech company at an industry conference earlier this year.

The shocking experiences underpinning this observation are not hard to find. The BBC’s own security correspondent, Frank Gardner, a wheelchair user since being shot on duty in Saudi Arabia in 2004, has reported repeatedly about being stranded on an aircraft while lost mobility aids are retrieved for him.

Then there are the everyday challenges that some travellers face. At the GBTA convention in Dallas this summer, John Sage, CEO of Sage Inclusion and a wheelchair user, kicked off an education session by “venting”.

“Last night I arrived at my hotel and there wasn’t a shower chair in the bathroom,” he said. “I called [reception] to tell them and the front desk guy says ‘We’ll see if we can find one’.”

The following day, Sage was unable to catch a shuttle bus from his hotel to the convention centre because it didn’t have level access, but hotel staff were unable to share that until the bus arrived. And when he took to the sidewalks he was encumbered by construction works.

“It's really sort of the norm with business travel. If you're travelling with disability, this is all typical stuff that happens,” says Sage. “But the accessibility barriers are different on every trip I take so there’s a lot of anxiety because I don't know what I'm getting into. If it was always the same three things I could plan around it but it's different things every time.”

Stories of wheelchairs being left in the rain or damaged in transit, and of passengers with pacemakers being subjected to humiliating strip searches at airport security are not uncommon.

Sage recalls travelling to London for an event at which his colleagues had to carry him up a flight of stairs to the reception. “How am I going to be perceived as equal and on a competitive level if they're having to carry me upstairs?”

Maiden Voyage, a consultancy which advises on wellbeing and safety for diverse business travellers, has collected examples of problems including hotels saying they have accessible bedrooms but whose doorways prove too narrow for wheelchairs. “If a hotel has an accessibility policy and doesn’t follow it, that’s almost worse than not having a policy in some respects because the guest would not have opted to stay there in the first place,” says CEO Carolyn Pearson.

"You spend more of your working hours planning travel so your working day is shrunk and that's not really an equitable work environment"

All the above are examples of arrangements going wrong. But even trips where everything goes right are very hard work for disabled employees such is the level of organisation required, a wheelchair-using business traveller explains in a video produced by Maiden Voyage. “It’s about planning,” the traveller says, “almost planning to be exhausted.” The biggest stress of all, he adds, is the fear that an unforeseen problem may arise.

Sage concurs: “Accessibility information is not standardised in any way. A lot of times it is just bullet points or it's just vague and it's insufficient. Travellers are having to spend more of their working hours planning their own travel so your working day is shrunk and that's not really an equitable work environment.”

He says that persistently encountering barriers while travelling “creates these strong emotions and you say, ‘you know what? I don’t want to travel’. I’m going to stay at home and I’ll do a Zoom call. It’s these emotions that have to be overcome and eliminated in order to get people travelling. The key message here is that these feelings are caused by the accessibility barriers, not by the wheelchair or the injury or the illness – it’s the barriers that cause this.”

EQUITABLE ENVIRONMENT

Taking action to solve these huge challenges is a critical – but often critically neglected – responsibility for any company genuinely committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. The obstacles are so formidable that they deter disabled people not merely from becoming business-travelling employees; they can be deterred from becoming employees at all.

“They might not even consider a job where travel is involved because they think it is not possible for them. But in fact it’s because the workplace doesn’t provide the right environment for them,” says Dr Marion Karl, a senior lecturer at the University of Surrey who has researched the challenges faced by disabled business travellers.

“There are different kinds of barriers and one of the biggest barriers for disabled people is the attitudes of society which thinks they either don’t want to travel or don’t need to travel. Changing our opinion about it is the first big step. Employers needs to accept that higher cost and more effort is a fact, and be more open to that kind of flexible arrangement,” says Karl.

For companies wanting to develop an accessible business trave strategy, “Start by creating a focus group of disabled travellers,” says Pearson. The guiding principle, she argues, should be “never about us without us.”

As Sage notes: “It's a heavy lift to ask somebody who doesn't have accessibility experience to implement accessibility.”

The travel manager speaker quoted earlier in this article delivered a similar message. Asked where to begin, he said: “Listen to the community. Ask them what their pain points are. Be open with them about your bandwidth and resources and then see how you can overlay the two to create the perfect fit for your company.”

"I would love to check into a hotel and at the front desk they ask me ‘would you like us to remove the desk chair from the room?’ That would be really nice"

His company resolved to “make business travel universally accessible to all”. That philosophy begins with the induction process for new employees where “we ask employees to choose from a list of options that would make travel more comfortable for them”.

On the supplier side, Sage advocates deep staff training. “I would love to check into a hotel and at the front desk they ask me ‘would you like us to remove the desk chair from the room?’ That would be really nice. It's always in the way and I have to move it myself and sometimes there's not a whole lot of room to move it to. There's this role-specific training that's needed.”

Sage says that in his consulting work travel suppliers often ask for a checklist. “I can point them to the ISO international accessible travel guidelines [21902]. It’s 300 pages – there’s your checklist,” he says.

IMPROVING SERVICE

Meanwhile, in her most recent academic study, Karl makes four recommended actions to improve service for disabled employees. These are:

Pay for the difference: From favouring direct over indirect flights to using taxis instead of public transport and needing specialised hotel rooms, travel is often more expensive for disabled travellers, thereby potentially making it non-compliant with company travel policy. It may seem common sense that exceptions can be assumed for disabled employees but in reality, says Karl, they may find seeking exceptions stressful and also not wish to advertise their disability to their line manager.

Consequently, says Karl, “We found in our study that the traveller would cover themselves the additional costs they incurred for business travel to accommodate their special needs.” The solution, she wrote in the study, is that “Each employer needs to establish central funds to cover the additional costs often borne by disabled workers when travelling for work-based purposes.”

Use specialised trip booking assistance: This could be a specialist travel agent, or either an internal assistance desk or dedicated desk at the TMC. American Express Global Business Travel consulting manager Kayleigh Rogers said her company is now making its accessibility desk created originally for the tech company client available to the rest of its customer base.

CWT is also enlarging its specialist care team because of more clients showing “a strong focus on the wellbeing of all employees”, says traveller experience vice president Ann Marie Stone. “Our intent is not to label the disability. We ask to understand the needs that are required, not necessarily the disability.”

Respect disabled travellers’ privacy: “A process by which an individual can disclose their disability to their employer without informing the direct supervisors and those in their immediate workplace needs to be created,” Karl wrote. An assistance desk answers this particular need.

Make information available: Sage says that one of the travel sector’s biggest shortcomings is not necessarily a lack of appropriate facilities, but rather the provision of relevant accessibility information. “It needs to be accurate and comprehensive and covering all parts of the hotel, enabling a traveller to make an informed decision.”

He continues: “It's documenting and publishing that accessibility information so that it's available in advance so that your disabled employees can see this information and judge for themselves. So they don't have to pick up the phone, call somebody and ask.”

Sage notes that there are 14 accessibility features of a toilet alone. “I haven't even gotten into the roll-in shower and the sink, and I haven't gotten out to the bedroom to get to the bed and the closet and the desk. And I haven't even left the room to get to the restaurant or the building entrance. This is a really complex issue. It's not something that can be solved easily.”

Thus it's important to build a repository of information about, for example, which suppliers provide good assistance and which do not. Returning to the mantra of “never about us without us”, Pearson says the primary source for such insights should be travellers themselves.

When it comes to planning travel, most online booking tools are poor at managing assistance services, said speakers at an industry conference. Stone agrees about booking tools and adds that, more generally, corporate clients should be “advocating within the supplier base to increase accessibility.”

However, the incentive to act is great. Not only can travel managers help their companies align much better with their DEI goals, they can also directly improve the lives of colleagues. The travel manager speaker quoted at the beginning of this article told his audience that creating a disability strategy was one of the most rewarding projects he has ever undertaken.

USE YOUR INFLUENCE

Sage’s advice for corporates? “Accessibility is normally handled with a reactive approach. ‘Tell us what you need’ is often when the accessibility journey starts and that's way too late. The reactive approach is really time consuming for the trip planner, so it ends up being a big time sink. You're doing a customised solution every time and then once you have that solution, it's not really applicable to the next person.”

He says that upfront time and investment is required so that when a traveller with particular accessibility needs names a destination and dates, the trip planner has all the right information at their fingertips. “OK, so you’re going to a meeting in New Orleans. Here’s the hotels we recommend. Avoid this neighbourhood because accessibility is really bad. Here’s your transportation options. Your employee is going to feel more included that way.”

In top locations, corporates should have a list of “prioritised, accessible hotels”. But, he adds: “What would be even more inclusive is if the only hotels that you list are accessible ones, so that the disabled employee never has to stay at a different hotel to their colleagues.”

Buyers should also use their influence to get hotels up to standard: “Tell hotels, ‘if you’re going to get on our preferred list, you have to meet a minimum accessibility standard.’ I would love to see the people with purchasing power start to demand third party accreditation of hotels’ accessibility.”

But Sage believes that until accessibility is a line item in the budget, there won’t be enough progress. “Getting it into the budget is the key barrier and once you get in the budget then it starts to get up to the upper levels of management because they actually don't need to look at that number and then it gets resource,” he says. “That's one of the biggest barriers – you just need to get some money spent on it.”