Blue Badge Style founder, Fiona, has written an article for the latest edition of Hospitality Today an online magazine for the UK’s hospitality market. The magazine possesses a circulation of over 35,000. Blue Badge Style hopes that a good proportion of that number will agree with our point of view and reach out to the emerging market of the discerning less able.

In it she explains that greater commitment to making hospitality venues accessible is beneficial, not just from an equality point of view, but in purely business terms too. We believe that style and access shouldn’t be mutually exclusive and this is one way to motivate people to make that more possible.

The discerning less able, an emerging market noted by The Economist and Merrill Lynch, has a latent demand to eat and drink at stylish venues. Comprised of both aging baby boomers and younger disabled people, there is a £2billion market out there consisting of less able bodied people. One in three people now know someone who is disabled; yet the hospitality industry is yet to have caught up with this.

We think that if quality hotels were to tap into this selling point, by providing good disabled access and advertising it in more intelligent ways, for instance, by using the BBS Pictorial Access Description, the advantages could be huge for them. So there really is no reason for a venue to be inaccessible in this day and age.

Hospitality Today
Hospitality Today

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