Open Access

Hans-Peter Hutter, Alireza Darvishy, Stephan Roth, Susanne Gäumann, Heidi Kaspar, Tatjana Thimm, Maksym Gaiduk, Sandra Evans, Martin Rosenberg

• This paper presents the goals, service design approach, and the results of the project “Accessible Tourism around Lake Constance”, which is currently run by different universities, industrial partners and selected hotels in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. In the 1st phase, interviews with different persons with disabilities and elderly persons have been conducted to identify the barriers and pains faced by tourists who want to spend their holidays in the region of Lake Constance as well as possible assistive technologies that help to overcome these barriers. The analysis of the interviews shows that one third of the pains and barriers are due to missing, insufficient, wrong or inaccessible information about the accessibility of the accommodation, surroundings, and points of interests during the planning phase of the holidays. Digital assistive technologies hence play a major role in bridging this information gap. In the 2nd phase so-called Hotel-Living-Labs (HLL) have been established where the identified assistive technologies can be evaluated. Based on these HLLs an overall service for accessible holidays has been designed and developed. In the last phase, this service has been implemented based on the HLLs as well as the identified assistive technologies and is currently field tested with tourists with disabilities from the three participated countries.