How We Planned Our Accessible European Vacation: Successes and Challenges

AUDIO VERSION

By Richard Marion

A Dream Vacation Begins

Traveling the world as a blind person is both rewarding and challenging. This year, my husband and I embarked on one of our dream vacations. While the trip itself was amazing, planning it had the potential to turn into a nightmare.

Over the next while, I will be sharing articles about our vacation highlights, accessibility issues we encountered, and my personal recommendations for anyone planning an independent multi-city European vacation without relying on multi-day guided bus tours. This first article focuses on how I planned our nearly three-week itinerary.

Using AI as a Travel Assistant

For planning our vacation, I started out with the assistance of a travel agent to book hotels and transportation. However, partway through the planning process, the travel agent was unable to finish the arrangements. That meant I took over the planning myself, including researching hotels, transportation, and attractions. In planning our trip, I knew that we would have to be located in major cities as neither one of us drives and it would be important to be near public transit. I used AI to assist with much of the research for each destination we planned to visit. I also learned that when using AI for research and planning, it can be a bit ambitious when suggesting a daily itinerary for each city. I worked with my husband to make sure we did not try to pack too much into each day. The primary reasons I used AI was to assist in learning about accessibility features of attractions and also for proposed transportation planning in each city. With the transportation planning, we also found out that using Google Maps and other mapping apps produced more accurate results on routes and timelines.

Three Weeks, Three Cities

Before getting too far into the process of planning, I should outline our itinerary, which included:

          •         Edinburgh for 5 days

          •         London for 9 days

          •         Paris for 5 days.

We traveled between each city by high-speed train, rather than flying.

Experiencing Europe by Public Transit

Since we decided not to take any multi-day bus tours, we wanted to experience each city as a local. This meant using the public transit system whenever possible, so we used buses and trains in each city. All three cities use a Tap to Pay system for their buses and trains, and the apps to load tickets in London and Paris were generally accessible. In Edinburgh, we had to use a Tap to Pay debit card as they did not offer an app or a reloadable transit card like London’s Oyster card. The Tap to Pay machines in most cities give an audible verification that the payment was successful. However, on the buses in Edinburgh, the part of the machine that beeped when tapping was in the drivers’ compartment behind plexiglass. This made it difficult to hear whether the payment had been accepted.

Booking tickets for events and transportation proved to be somewhat accessible. I did have mixed results using apps like Expedia and Trainline. When trying to book tickets on the London North Eastern Railway, I ended up having to use the UK version of their app because the international version was not accessible with a screen reader.  Therefore, I did not benefit from pricing in Canadian dollars when booking the train tickets to London. For Eurostar, this was one booking where I received assistance from a travel agent. I did find their website accessible enough to upload international travel documents for both of us to have our tickets issued.

Lessons Learned About Accessible Travel Planning

Planning a trip on your own can both be rewarding and frustrating. It does require considerable research, and the ability to be comfortable with using your screen reader on both the web and with specific travel apps. Booking this type of vacation on your own does require extensive planning and organization. I ended up completing about 90% of the travel planning and bookings using my mobile device and only using a computer when the desktop version of a website was more usable. I say usable because most travel websites are not completely accessible. While many travel websites and apps still have accessibility barriers, I found that with persistence, and a little help from AI, it was absolutely possible to plan almost our entire trip independently. The extra work was worth it because it allowed us to experience each city on our own terms.

Coming Up: Visiting the World of Downton Abbey

In my next article I will focus on some of the unique experiences from our trip, including what it took to visit the set of Downton Abbey. It was one of the highlights of our vacation, and getting there was an adventure all its own.

List of travel apps Used: All available in the App Store

•   Expedia

•   Trip Adviser (research only for this trip)

•   WestJet

• Trainline

• LNER (London North Eastern Railway)

•    Railcard (App for purchasing disability Rail Card for Discounts)

  
  

AI Apps Used for Research and Planning

• Gemini

• Chat GPT