Digital Accessibility in Travel: From Overlooked to Overbooked

In the travel and hospitality industry, you've navigated revenue management systems, OTA commission wars, and post-pandemic demand volatility. But there's a strategic gap in most travel brands' digital portfolios that rarely makes the executive agenda. And it's quietly costing you bookings, rankings, and regulatory standing.

That gap is called digital accessibility.

The passengers you're not boarding

According to the World Health Organisation (2023), 1.3 billion people globally live with a disability, which is 16% of the world's population. In Europe specifically, Eurostat (2022) puts the figure at 101 million, representing 27% of the population. That's not a niche segment. That's a quarter of your potential customers.

And yet most travel booking platforms: websites, apps, and booking engines systematically exclude them.

The barriers are often invisible to those who don't experience them: a departure date picker that can't be navigated with a keyboard, a hotel description PDF that a screen reader cannot parse, a checkout button with contrast ratios that fail for users with low vision, a video tour with no captions for a traveller with hearing loss.

According to the 2026 WebAIM Million Report (the largest annual automated audit of web accessibility, covering one million home pages), the travel sector ranks 23rd out of 29 industry categories, with 10.4% more accessibility errors than the cross-industry average of 56.1 errors per page. This places travel firmly among the worst-performing sectors on the web, alongside shopping, real estate, sport, and style. The finding is particularly striking given that travel websites are almost entirely transactional. A user who cannot navigate a booking form, read low-contrast text, or interact with an inaccessible date picker cannot complete a purchase. And yet the same six failure types have dominated every edition of the report for seven consecutive years: low contrast text, missing image alt text, unlabelled form inputs, empty links, empty buttons, and missing document language. For an industry serving a market where travellers with a disability and their companions represent tens of billions in annual spending, these are the barriers at the very first point of contact.

The legal landscape

The European Accessibility Act (EAA), EU Directive 2019/882, has been enforceable across all EU member states since 28 June 2025. It applies directly to private companies offering products and services digitally, and the travel sector is explicitly named in scope: passenger transport services, including air, rail, waterborne, and urban transport, fall under the directive's requirements. For travel brands selling across Europe, compliance is no longer a consideration but a legal obligation.

In practice, this means your website, mobile app, booking platform, PDFs with onboarding passes or booking confirmation, digital forms and campaign landing pages must meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA, as defined by the European standard EN 301 549.

Each EU member state has transposed the EAA into national law with its own enforcement mechanisms. Penalties apply per market and per infringement. In some jurisdictions, fines can reach €907,000 per violation. If you operate across multiple EU markets, the risk is cumulative.

Non-compliance also carries reputational risk that no PR strategy can fully contain.

The Vuelling case

The European Accessibility Act came into force on 28 June 2025, but this was the enforcement deadline, not the starting gun. Companies falling within scope were expected to have already achieved compliance by that date. This distinction matters legally: pre-existing national accessibility laws across EU member states were already in effect, and regulators were already acting on them.

The Vueling Airlines case illustrates this clearly. Spain's National High Court confirmed a €90,000 fine against the carrier in 2024 for failing to make its website accessible, which is a violation of Spain's Royal Legislative Decree 1/2013 on the rights of persons with disabilities. What made the ruling particularly damning was the court's finding that Vueling's website remained almost as inaccessible as it had been when the airline was first inspected and sanctioned back in 2016. Eight years of non-compliance, two enforcement actions, and minimal corrective progress.

The EAA doesn't replace that existing legal landscape, but raises the bar across all 27 member states simultaneously.

Why accessibility is a growth lever

The accessible tourism market is substantial and growing. According to the latest research by Growth Market Reports, the global accessible tourism market size reached USD 107.4 billion in 2024 and is poised to grow at a robust CAGR of 7.2% from 2025 to 2033. By the end of 2033, the accessible tourism market is forecasted to achieve a value of USD 203.1 billion. This growth is primarily driven by increasing public awareness, legislative support, and the expanding aging population worldwide, which together are fueling the demand for accessible travel solutions and inclusive tourism experiences.

But the opportunity extends far beyond users with permanent disabilities. Microsoft's Inclusive Design research has consistently shown that for every person with a permanent disability, significantly more users experience functionally similar limitations in situational or temporary contexts: a business traveller on a delayed flight trying to rebook one-handed on a phone, an older passenger struggling with low-contrast text in bright sunlight, a non-native speaker who benefits from clearer copy and stronger visual hierarchy.

Accessibility improvements also deliver measurable performance gains that matter to any commercially-focused executive:

SEO and discoverability. Proper heading structures, descriptive alt text, semantic HTML, meaningful link text and fast-loading pages are exactly what both screen readers and search engine crawlers depend on. A 2025 study by Semrush, analysing over 800 websites, found that sites with fewer accessibility issues consistently achieved +23% organic traffic and +27% keyword visibility improvements. As AI-powered search (Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity) increasingly replaces traditional search results, well-structured, semantically clean content becomes even more valuable, because that's precisely what these systems prioritise.

Conversion and satisfaction: Accessible design means clearer navigation, more readable content, better colour contrast, and more intuitive forms. These improvements benefit every user. In a sector where customer experience directly drives loyalty and repeat booking, this matters.

The case study is already written. Radisson Hotels, working with Accessiway across their website and app in 11 languages and 95 countries, embedded accessibility into their continuous digital transformation programme. The result: key barriers removed across their booking funnel, WCAG-aligned improvements guiding all digital updates, and a Gold award at the International Customer Experience Awards 2025 for digital transformation.

Accessibility is not a project with a completion date. It's infrastructure. And Radisson now treats it as exactly that.

How Accessiway supports travel brands

Accessiway is Europe's leading provider of digital accessibility, serving 2,000+ clients across 4 European offices with 550+ B2B partners.

For travel brands, our approach addresses the full complexity of the sector:

Accessibility Platform is our flagship SaaS platform. It continuously audits your digital estate:  website, booking engine, mobile app (iOS and Android), PDFs, and delivers a prioritised remediation backlog with AI-assisted fix guidance. Real-time dashboards give your leadership team visibility on compliance status across all markets, and continuous monitoring ensures that new content and features don't reintroduce barriers.

Our IAAP-certified accessibility experts perform in-depth manual testing that automated tools cannot replicate. Automated scans identify a portion of accessibility issues, but a significant share can only be found through human judgment: the nuanced, context-dependent barriers that no script detects. Our experts test across multiple operating systems and browsers, log issues with screenshots and solution guidance, and deliver conformance statements that satisfy regulators and procurement requirements.

User testing with real users with disabilities is where compliance becomes genuinely validated. We conduct structured testing sessions with participants who use assistive technologies in their daily lives, like screen readers, switch controls, voice navigation, and keyboard navigation. Their experience reveals usability gaps that expert audits alone cannot surface, and ensures that remediation has actually improved the real-world experience, not just satisfied a checklist.

Accessibility-Service-as-a-Product means we embed into your existing workflows. We work directly with your Digital, IT, Marketing, Performance and App teams, holding courses, running retesting cycles, and ensuring that accessibility is maintained as your digital estate evolves.

The Question You Need to Answer

You manage revenue, yield and customer acquisition carefully. You optimise distribution and pricing. You invest in CX.

If your goal is to reach more customers, build loyalty and grow revenue from digital channels, can you afford to systematically exclude 27% of your potential European audience?

accessiway.com | Accessibility Platform

Sources: WHO (2023); Eurostat (2022); WebAIM Million Report (2026); ArcTouch SOMAA (2025); Accessiway consumer survey, n=6,599, DE/AT/FR/IT/UK, Aug–Nov 2025; Semrush (2023 & 2025), AccessibleEU 2024, Accessible Tourism Market Research Report 2023.