Florence, November 12 (askanews) – Choosing where to go on vacation can be challenging for a person with a disability, especially due to the lack of reliable information on the accessibility of facilities and destinations. This is one of the issues raised at BTO 2026 in Florence by Roberto Vitali, CEO and co-founder of Village for All, an organization specializing in accessible hospitality. According to Vitali, information must be collected and verified by experts so that each traveler can assess whether a facility meets their needs.
Accessibility also represents an economic opportunity: citing the experiences of Bibione, Cortina, and Peccioli, Vitali estimates potential increases in business turnover of between 15 and 20%. However, it remains difficult to determine how many Italian destinations are actually accessible, due to the lack of a shared evaluation methodology. To address this issue, Village for All has developed Destination4All, a protocol that proposes common criteria for improving the accessibility of tourist destinations and communicating this information to visitors. "A facility that declares its accessibility information," says Vitali, "is truly accessible to everyone, especially if it has it declared by a third-party body, a third-party organization with the expertise to provide information—not so much to declare accessibility, but to provide the information needed to be chosen by those with accessibility needs." "Accessible tourism is certainly an investment, as the data I presented demonstrates.
In Bibione, accessible tourism has been underway since 2018, as have Cortina and Peccioli, and the businesses and entrepreneurs who are working on it have seen a 15 to 20 percent increase in their revenues,” explains Vitali, who believes that “the most common obstacle a tourist with disabilities or accessibility needs encounters is a lack of information about what they will find once they arrive at the facility, once they reach their destination.
There's no information on the entire supply chain, and there's no quality information. This is the biggest challenge." "We don't really know which Italian tourist destinations are accessible. We don't know because there's no single methodology. This is why we created Destination4All, this protocol that allows destinations to be recognized not just with a brand, but with a consolidated working methodology that allows them to operate on both the national and international markets," Vitali concludes.
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