With your co-operation, Discover Kerry will be a part of an international best practice project bringing uniformity to accessibility feature sets. Tourism organisations in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland are involved with this project. A number of UK and Ireland destination and international booking websites are also aligned within this project.
About the Project
A Visit England Accessibility and Inclusion project has been underway for some time have been looking to define top search terms per product type for accessibility, as phraseology, feature terms, and ways of gathering and presenting accessibility and inclusion information have been varied across the world.
Early on in the process, the intention was to understand the key features that are important to people with accessible requirements. This project aims to standardise search terms so that users can easily understand and recognise terminology. The progress being made will work alongside the Visit England Accessibility Toolkit and throughout the project, ATAs including Booking.com have been consulted.
Since late 2023 Discover Kerry’s website provider Simpleview (part of the Granicus company) has been involved in this project, involving Failte Ireland, Tourism Ireland, Tourism Northern Ireland, Visit England, Visit Scotland and Visit Wales. Led by Ross Caladine of Visit England, Access Able has been a big part of this work.
Benefits
One insight this project identified is that people travelling with impairments generally like to contact the business ahead of travel if the business do not provide an accessibility guide on their website. In the UK, Visit England are working with platforms and destination sites to ensure uniformity.
Another insight is around repeat visitors - if visitors find providers ideal for their needs they will be a returning visitor.
Furthermore, Kerry as a destination is making continued progress with various accessibility and inclusion initiatives and this development adds to the continued effort and progress being made to support those with visible and hidden disabilities.
Actions for Discover Kerry Businesses
Simpleview have created a series of six questionnaires for business types including: Attractions and Experiences, Self Catering, Serviced Accommodation, Camping, Glamping and Holiday Parks, Food and Drink; and Events and Festivals to enable client destinations to survey businesses and update results to the www.discoverkerry.com platform.
- Each questionnaire will take approximately three minutes to complete
- The questionnaires have been developed by Visit England so please bear this in mind regarding some terminology etc.
- If your business has multiple product types ie an attraction who also hosts events and glamping, you would need to complete each questionnaire that applies.
- For Simpleview to map your results, each business needs to copy in the url path for your listing on the Discover Kerry website to a required field. For example, if you are Valentia Island Caravan and Camping, you paste in the listing url from the listing on Discover Kerry, ie https://www.discoverkerry.com/listing/valentia-island-caravan-%26-camping/67606101/
- If your business is not listed on the website and you wish to contribute to this then please submit your details for inclusion and we will confirm your listing url once live. Submit Your Listing here.
- After a period of 3 months, the old accessibility features listed will be switched over to the new accessibility features.
Complete the Questionnaire
To be be part of this exciting development, we need just three minutes of your time to help your listing on www.discoverkerry.com adapt to International Best Practice:
Attractions and experiences
Self Catering Accommodation
Serviced accommodation
Events, Festivals & Shows
Food & Drink
Camping Glamping & Holiday Parks
Businesses Listings with Accessibility Features
Please take a look below at the current range of businesses listed on the website who have selected a range of accessibility facilities within their business listing. If your business is not included in this current list, simply ensure that you follow the steps outlined above to be included in the Accessibility and Inclusivity Feature Set update which will take place in July 2025.
