Adding and updating your accessibility features on your listing

Image - Noah's Ark Zoo Farm

Visit West, alongside VisitEngland and Access and Inclusion UK, have been working to improve the accessibility information provided to visitors to our region. In order to do this effectively, we need to update information about what you, as businesses, offer and how we can showcase that information to visitors and customers.

What is accessibility?

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) is a topic being addressed by an increasing number of businesses. In summary, the term ‘equality’ relates to ensuring that everyone can access the same opportunities, ‘diversity’ means valuing the differences between people and their identifying characteristics, and ‘inclusion’ is a measure of how safe and welcome people feel in their environment. These are important, big-picture concepts that accessibility is embedded into.

Simply put, accessibility is all about removing barriers (whether physical, digital, relating to information and content, or attitudinal) to promote positive and equal experiences for all. It is the ‘actionable’ part of ensuring that EDI is on the agenda for disabled people in particular, but can also provide great benefit to customers and colleagues who might identify differently.

To truly be effective, accessible tourism should involve the delivery of accessible products, services and environments and enable people with impairments and accessibility requirements to have independence and autonomy over their experience.

Why is it important?

1. Improving customer service and the visitor experience;
2. Meeting the needs of underserved markets i.e. disabled people;
3. Responding to changing markets i.e. an ageing population;
4. Tapping into the growth of ‘3G’ family holidays and breaks (where three generations of a family travel together);
5. Ensuring that valuable business is not lost: one person with accessibility requirements can influence a whole group’s travel plans;
6. Contributing to sustainable and responsible tourism product development;
7. Growing visitor numbers, both domestically and inbound;
8. Supporting resilience and recovery in times of crisis e.g. the COVID 19 pandemic;
9. Creating more job opportunities for disabled people;
10. Boosting the image of your business
11. Return visit and advocates for your business

Image - WWT Slimbridge

Updating your listing/s

We are currently asking all of our member businesses to fill in a short, easy to use questionnaire, (which should ONLY take between 3-5 minutes to complete), letting us know what are the key accessibility features that you currently offer for people with accessibility requirements. Please note, that we will be working to improve access to more detailed access guides in the future as well, see our next steps section at the bottom of this blog.

These facilities have been developed with VisitEngland and other partners in the UK with extensive research to identify the most important features that people need to know in order to travel. These new facilities aim to build standardised facilities and feature sets across all tourism websites, including OTAs such as Booking.com and AirBnB etc.

We will be sending out emails to the lead/relevant contact on file at your organisation to complete these questionnaires. If you have not received an email from us by Friday 9 May 2025, please let us know by emailing membership@visitwest.co.uk and we can arrange for one to be sent. If you receive the email, but are not the correct person, please do forward on to the relevant person. 

View our step-by-step guide to completing the form here.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION

• The deadline to complete this form is Friday 11 July 2025. If you don’t fill out this form by the deadline then any accessibility facilities you currently have will disappear and you will not be featured on accessibility pages and searches across the website.
• Please note that the website will only display features for your venue that you select ‘yes’ for, for example if you do not have facilities for assistance dogs, then no reference to this will be published.

The following are not included in this questionnaire as they are statutory responsibilities, which should be provided as standard:

- assistance dogs welcome; 

- information on the 14 major allergens in any food provided, along with food labeling requirements.

Top tips for completing the questionnaire

• Be honest - if you have any doubt about a feature, do not tick the box.
• Read the guidance - follow the guidance available for each question.
• Review regularly - to ensure the information remains accurate, update the information as soon as you make a change and review the answers at least annually.
• You MUST add your url from Visit Bath or Visit Bristol, that is NOT your own url/web address but the one from your listing on the Visit Bath or Visit Bristol website. e.g https://visitbath.co.uk/food-and-drink/green-park-brasserie-p27921 OR https://visitbristol.co.uk/listing/mercure-bristol-grand-hotel/3877101 - you can simply copy and paste from the url bar at the top of the page onto the form.
• If you have multiple listings on either the Visit Bath website or the Visit Bristol website (or both!) you will need to complete a separate form for each of these listings. If you aren't sure which listings you have on the website, please reach out to Amelia, Dan or Ian who will be able to let you know.

Image - The Wave

What else do we need from you?

Images

Do you have any great images showing visitors enjoying your place to stay, attraction, shop, restaurant or experience? We are always on the lookout for inclusive imagery to showcase the region, these will be used on the websites as well as for press and media, visitor guides and more, so please do let us know what you have.

Update your description (as well as your facilities)

As well as filling in the form that we will send you, please do feel free to email us with any accessibility information to also be added to the main description (shown below as an example). Not only will this help your visitors find the information in different ways, search engines will be able to pick up on this, making it more likely that someone will go straight to your business listing when looking for certain information. Plus, it helps us here at Visit West know about what you have so that we can better promote you and add you to relevant pages, blogs, and social media posts.

Image - an example of an accessibility section in the main description of a business listing

VisitEngland's Accessible and Inclusive Tourism Toolkit for Businesses

For essential guidance to help you improve your welcome for customers with accessibility requirements, check out VisitEngland’s Accessible and Inclusive Tourism Toolkit for Businesses, which includes practical tips and action checklists specific to your business type and technical built environment guidance for when new-build, refurbishment, conversion, and adaptation projects are possible.

Our commitment to accessibility and next steps

This exercise is part of a wider project to improve accessibility in our region for visitors and will feed into the project as a whole. Along with our Accessibility LVEP lead, Laura Valentine and the LVEP team, will we be rolling out more information about improving accessibility with links to more resources, featuring more detailed access guides, case studies, awards and information soon. We will let you know here and in our weekly industry enewsletters as more of this is rolled out. If in the meantime, you would like to get in touch with us, please do so at membership@visitwest.co.uk.