Tourism Today 8th Edition | Page 6

A lecture at Unicolombo about Accesible Tourism

TOURISM TODAY

6

Academic Trek

Accessible Tourism is, according to Ximena Villota, from Viceministry of Tourism, a specific turistic offer for people who have disabilities, which prefer be called: "People with different capacities". In Colombia, we started to talk about Accessible Tourism in 2016. The type of tourism that was being offered before, related to accessible tourism was "Social Tourism", promoted by compensation funds, the Political Constitution of Colombia, the Law 300 of 1996 and the tourism sectoral plan.

The Universal design to create products for this type of tourism, is based on some principles:

Equitable use.

Flexibility in the use.

Simple and intuitive use

Perceptible information

Error tolerance.

Less Physical effort

Ximena Villota visited Unicolombo to talk with the students from the Bachelor of Business in Tourism and Hospitality Management, about the importance of Accessible Tourism, in order to create awareness. It is necessary to change people's mind face this topic because there are still not also physical barriers in the environment but attitudinal limits.

For those reasons, the Viceminister of Tourism has started to work in some actions such as: Accessible Tourist Signalling, Accessibility requirements in the Sectoral Techniques Regulations and training in sign language for Tourism Police.

Finally, Ximena Villota showed a video that let the students reflect about what important is to change our attitud at the moment of treating people with different capacities, given that, she thinks that "disability is caused because of the lack of accessibility for people with different capacities".

Ximena Villota, from Viceministry of Tourism, talks about Accesible Tourism