The geography of dignity and the ethics of care in air travel

Air transport is a cornerstone of global mobility and tourism, yet it often fails to protect the rights and dignity of passengers with disabilities (PwDs). Accessible tourism, although placing dignity as its key dimension, still tends to focus more on physical infrastructure and service transactions. Our study aims to further unpack dignity as the core of accessibility, highlighting how it is either afforded or denied through structural, procedural, and interpersonal interactions. Positioned at the intersection of critical tourism and mobilities studies and the feminist ethics of care, this study adopts an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA)–a method that foregrounds the meaning-making of embodied and relational experiences–to examine how PwDs in the Netherlands experience, negotiate, and make sense of dignity during air travel. Drawing on 13 in-depth interviews, we identify critical moments of recognition and marginalisation across the air travel continuum, with journeys beginning and ending at a major Dutch airport. These narratives show how dignity is deeply entangled with spatial and social geographies of mobility, extending beyond terminals and checkpoints into the embodied and emotional experience of airspace itself. In doing so, we contribute to theorisations of dignity in tourism by proposing a dual ethical framework: the ethics of systemic neglect and the ethics of care-full attention. We argue that dignity is not merely tied to specific spaces of travel, but unfolds as a fluid, lived process across borders, bodies, and encounters, calling for an understanding of accessibility that recognises dignity as continually negotiated rather than statically assured.