DigAccessAgrotourism: Digital transition for accessible Agrotourism

ongoing

The UN (2022) estimates that globally there are over 1 billion people with disabilities,meaning that 15% of the global population is estimated to have some kind of need for accessibility assistance.While this underlines a significant possibility for travel and tourism,and while the European Commission highlights the pertaining need for tourism businesses to be universally accessible and create barrier-free tourism, agrotourism facilities and services all over Europe remain inaccessible to individuals with disabilities.Accessible tourism enables all individuals including those with access limitations to mobility, vision and hearing to actively participate and be included in agrotourism experiences. An increasing literature, suggests that existing digital solutions, approaches and tools based on the social economy’s digital innovations such as the Internet of Things (IoT), data driven solutions and digital social innovations can positively impact the agrotourism sector by providing vital digital solutions for improving the agrotourism experience (Verma and Shukla, 2019) and thus making organisations more accessible. This project aims to address the EU wide need of agrotourism organisations all over the EU to become more accessible to individuals with disabilities by boosting the digital transition of social economy enterprises and SMEs by aiding organisations operating in the agrotourism sector to become more accessible for individuals with disabilities through their digital means. This will be accomplished in two main ways, firstly by contributing in agrotourism organisations of the social economy’s (including associations, cooperatives and foundations) digital transition in relation to accessibility by aiding their capacity building according to their needs, and secondly, by contributing in enabling organisation’s capacity building according to their needs in order to be able to support agrotourism organisations’ digital transition on accessibility.