ACCESSIBLE BARCELONA.

Craig Grimes
Editor
AccessibleBarcelona.com

I had already had a lot of personal experience through traveling that what the hotel staff thought was accessible and my version were very different.

The first thing that I did after leaving the spinal injuries rehabilitation centre after my accident in 1997 was go traveling to Holland for a couple of weeks with a friend. It was a tough trip; however it sparked my enthusiasm for learning about new cultures and visiting different countries. In 2001 I traveled for several months in France and Spain before settling down in Barcelona in January 2002.

In October 2002 I decided it was time for another trip so I headed off to Germany for a month using Berlin as my base camp for exploration.

I've always bought guide books but they were never really useful with regards to disabled access for hotels, museums or other tourist attractions. To my frustration I found this particularly true of the guide I'd bought about Berlin. I had already contacted several mainstream guide book publishers in 2001 trying to encourage them to include more information about disabled access in their books. My intention was never to write a guide book just for disabled people as this probably isn't the most economically viable option, but to include information in the books they were already publishing. Due to my experiences in Berlin I decided it was worth another go.

When I returned to Barcelona I began sending emails to the major guide book publishers, writers and editors offering them help to improve the information for disabled access for their Barcelona guides. I received responses such as " I fully understand your frustration in getting things published. Unfortunately publishers operate with Euro signs in their eyes which always means minorities are underrepresented." I decided that the best way to tackle the situation was to write an online guide for disabled people about Barcelona to show the publishers what could be achieved at very little cost. And so www.accessiblebarcelona.com was created.

I started by writing about access issues in some of the main museums and tourist attractions in Barcelona describing what facilities were available at each place. As a continuation of this I began researching restaurants, bars and nightclubs with facilities for wheelchair users. The final part of the on-line guide was a page about public transport in the city including buses, metro, taxis, airport bus and tourist buses. A friend of mine kindly designed the first version of AccessibleBarcelona and it went live on the internet in the spring of 2003.

I continued to email the publishers of the major guide books but to no avail. However, a curious thing did begin to happen, by 2004 disabled people from different parts of the world started emailing me asking for advice about hotels or if I could reserve them a wheelchair accessible taxi. I hadn't undertaken any access audits on hotels at this point and it was becoming very clear that this was what was required. The first problem was how to find the hotels which had access. This was a long arduous task of looking on the internet and phoning individual hotels that claimed to have adapted rooms. I had already had a lot of personal experience through traveling that what the hotel staff thought was accessible and my version were very different, so I made appointments to visit the adapted rooms personally. As I already suspected the standard varied widely from hotel to hotel. Rather than use symbols to indicate accessible hotels I decided to describe them individually and include photographs of the adaptations.

I had never considered establishing a business providing travel services for disabled people and it certainly wasn't the motivation for writing AccessibleBarcelona. However, it evolved into a small company on it's own as clients began to ask for hotel reservations, airport transfers and equipment hire.

AccessibleBarcelona is now in its second year of business we now also provide wheeling tours in the centre of Barcelona, excursions in private adapted vehicles in Catalonia, personal assistants, arrange group trips and educational tours for schools.

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