Access Tourism NZ TOURISM FOR PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES, SENIORS, AND AGEING BOOMERS IN NEW ZEALAND AND WORLDWIDE

The Tourism New Zealand website has information about accessible accommodation.  The website states that “accessible accommodation in New Zealand provides access to comfortable accommodation for wheelchair users, disabled, elderly or infirm guests. Before booking your accommodation, you should always check with your hosts to check that adequate provision is available for your specific requirements, be it a general accessibility issue or specific facilities catering for hearing or visually impairment.”

However, the website fails to inform those wanting accessible accommodation in New Zealand that not all hosts know what true accessibility is.  This is borne out by a study of tourism operations on the West Coast of the south island, which looked at wheelchair access into the premises (i.e., could a person enter the premises in a wheelchair unassisted).  No other aspect of access was studied.  Even so, 90% of operators thought their businesses were easily or somewhat accessible, whereas only 38% were accessible in terms of wheelchair access, and this percentage was bound to be lower if all aspects of access had been studied.   With accommodation providers, only 30% of booking offices were wheelchair accessible, and of five “guaranteed-by-the-operator” wheelchair-accessible units (which were studied in depth for all aspects of accessibility), only two where truly accessible.

In addition, an examination of many “guaranteed-by-the-operator” wheelchair-accessible accommodation units throughout New Zealand has shown similar results.  The most recent: an examination in November 2009 of three large hotels in a large city – one about thirty years old, one about 12, and one only 2 years old – all of which should have complied with the standard for access in the NZ Building Code/Act because they have recently been refurbished or are new – but don’t.  Therefore, it is inadvisable for people with disabilities to rely upon the guarantees of accommodation providers, who are probably not trained in what true access is, and who unknowingly give false assurances.

The problem of quality assurance in access in accommodation (and indeed in all other tourism and travel sectors) in New Zealand could be alleviated if access for people with disabilities was part and parcel of our Qualmark ratings.  Qualmark New Zealand Limited is New Zealand tourism’s official quality agency. It is a government and private sector partnership between Tourism New Zealand and New Zealand Automobile Association. Qualmark “licenses professional and trustworthy New Zealand tourism businesses to use the Qualmark ‘tourism’s official quality mark’ to help international and domestic travellers select places to stay, things to do and ways to get around”.

This is a “role defined for Qualmark in the New Zealand tourism strategy to help achieve the industry’s overall goal to enhance New Zealand’s reputation as a world class visitor destination. Qualmark is run on a not-for-profit basis as a service to travellers and the tourism industry.”

The Qualmark website tells visitors that Qualmark’s function is “helping you find quality places to stay, things to do and ways to get there”.   However, the site does not provide a search engine which can be used to search for such things as “disability”,  “access”, wheelchair access”, or in fact any term.  Therefore, if a search is done for, say, a hotel in New Zealand’s capital city Wellington, what is provided are quick descriptive blurbs and links.  The potential tourist is then left to find out themselves which hotel claims to be accessible – with of course no guarantee that it is so.  There is no accessibility requirement amongst the criteria for the star grading system (Qualmark) in New Zealand, and no accessibility requirements, so that any operator can and does get the highest rating with no access.  Even worse is the fact that there is NO qualified assessment by a registered access assessor of those operations that claim they are accessible and get a Qualmark rating.

The Automobile Association Travel New Zealand website does allow searches using key words like “wheelchair” and “disability”.  A search today (21/12/2009) using several such terms for accessible accommodation in one of our major cities provided two hits. One was for a motel, but there is little information on the motel website, and the other was for a hotel.  There is no information about access for people with disabilities on the hotel’s website at all.  One problem concerning any business that does come up when terms such as “wheelchair’ or “disability” are searched on the AA website  is that, according to the AA, “all material is supplied by those advertising and is advertiser approved prior to publication” (NZAA personal communication).  Again, people with disabilities must rely upon the knowledge of operators, which can be a problem.  And customers who have been assured they are getting accessible accommodation (or access to any tourism business – restaurants, attractions etc), but end up in inadequate facilities are unsatisfied customers who will pass on this information.