Information technology: Understanding the needs of wheelchair users through shared tourism platforms

According to the World Health Organisation, 16% of the world’s population lives with a disability, and this number is expected to rise, primarily due to the advances in medical science. People with disabilities are emerging as a new segment of tourists, and new technologies are creating new opportunities for people with disabilities to participate in tourism. The paper aims to assess the key concerns of tourists with disabilities, by analysing the range of topics they search for and comment on collaborative tourism platforms, as well as how these topics have changed over the past five years. Data was collected from the Accessible Travel Forum from Tripadvisor, and the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model was used for the analysis to identify the key topics that concern disabled travelers, emerging from the sample of 588 comments in the forum. The findings indicate that the most frequent topics are accessibility needs in air travel, cruise travel and in relation to accommodation services. The intensity of these three topics has shown some fluctuations in the recent past; potentially due to travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, when air travel was restricted, which resulted in more interest in cruise travel. These findings bring practical implications to the tourism industry as they provide an insight into a yet relatively underserved tourism segment.