VisitScotland Access Assessment
Providing accommodation suitable for disabled people could open up a whole new market for you. Making your accommodation accessible to a wide spectrum of people with some form of a specific need means you can tap into the 9 million people in the UK alone, some 15% of the population, who at the present time have some form of physical or sensory impairment.

Indeed a proportion of your existing customers may have some form of disability that is not always apparent, and would appreciate some extra care taken in the general or specific provision. Often such provision will help other visitors to use the facilities too, and it need not be a costly exercise.

Research by the charity Holiday Care has shown that;

• More than 75% of disabled respondents considered an annual holiday to be important

• Over 45% of disabled people are in full-time employment

• Over 70% of long holidays and over 90% of short breaks by disable people had been taken in the UK in the previous year

In considering the business case for welcoming disabled customers, it is important to bear in mind that for the most part they travel with friends and family, so if a disabled person can''t access a facility, their friends and family won''t either and additional business will be lost. Disabled people also offer other business advantages in that they tend to book early and more importantly, they are a valuable source of repeat business once they find the right facilities.

VisitScotland offers a free National Accessible Standards assessment to members of its Quality Assurance Programmes, to gauge the extent of provision for physical access on a scale of one to three.

Further Information

In-depth criteria details can be found in the following section.

A full range of Quality Assurance guidelines are available here.