A TRAVEL TREND ON THE HORIZON.

Universal Design is a set of seven principles distilled from the shared dream of an earlier era. During the civil rights movement of the 1950's, 60's, and 70's Universal Design evolved to express the legitimate political objectives of the disability community in the fields of design, product manufacture, and construction. Architects, designers, educators, and other professionals, many with disabilities, enumerated the following design standards in order to guide the process of creating human-centered places, products, and policies that respect the role of imagination in design:

The goal of Universal Design is to create all products and environments to be as usable as possible by as many people as possible regardless of age, ability or situation. Universal Design is the vision, tended by the community of those with disabilities themselves, that stands behind the various partial solutions proposed in national legislation around the world.

A generation ago the disability community advanced the veiled petition, "Can you make this place or product accessible?" Universal Design poses to the world hard-nosed business challenge, "Given the business case for serving this market and knowing the effectiveness of multiple business models and technical solutions for doing so, how are you able to justify the business case for intentionally limiting your customer base by not using Universal Design?"

The travel & hospitality industry needs Universal Design if it is to capture that 15% - 20% of the population that has a disability. It must act quickly to be prepared for increase in that percentage brought on by the retirement of the Baby Boomers - a generation that will experience increasing disability year by year but is likely never to self-identify as disabled.

Respecting this generational aversion to identifying oneself as a person with a disability is a key factor that will separate the profitable from the unsustainable travel product.

Those of us with decades of experience negotiating systems of social and physical exclusion have developed strategies for success and reservoirs of patience that are not immediately available to those who are recently disabled. Conversely, those who have lived satisfying and successful lives using the full repertoire of their stature, senses, and cognitive abilities will not easily relinquish the status they once enjoyed. In other words, previously non-disabled Boomers who have amassed more wealth and more power than their peers who have fought for disability rights over the past fifty years will demand full inclusion as a birthright with all the fervor that comes from privilege - or they will take their wealth to a competitor as sophisticated consumers.

There is another factor that will figure into the success of those who capture the disabled and future senior niche in travel. Close observers of Universal Design and the senior market recognize the difference between purely accessible products and universally designed products as the difference between "sterile" and "style." Sterile may be effective in a laboratory or a hospital but style wins in the marketplace.

The vision of Universal Design turns the definition of "normal" upside down around the world. Advocates explain that the community of those with disabilities is the largest "minority group" in the world; will continue to grow as a percentage of the population as individuals live longer; and, in countries where legislation has allowed people with disabilities access to employment, is a community with a significant amount of disposable income as well as a desire to travel.

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