LocationsGrowing a Human-Centred Portfolio: Learnings from Thailand’s Inclusive Tourism Development
August 2, 2024
If local communities can move towards inclusive tourism, why is it so difficult to drive this agenda at the national level? How can Thailand transform its tourism sector to align with the Leave No One Behind agenda as well as seize this important market opportunity?
Last year, the UNDP Accelerator Lab Thailand took on the challenge to promote community-based tourism for all. We wanted to overturn the misconception that tourism for all is about investing big budgets into infrastructure development. It is so much more than that. It is about a shift of mindset, and it can only be achieved by co-creating solutions with the users, engaging people with disabilities every step of the way. While we succeeded in developing various prototypes for inclusive tourism at the community level, we also realized that tourism for all needs the development of the whole ecosystem. Travelers with disabilities do not only visit local communities but also need major tourist attractions, accommodations, restaurants, shops, and transportation to be inclusive. This topic calls for the portfolio approach where we design “a suite of interventions that are complementary and can shift complex systems by focusing on multiple intervention points at a given time” (UNDP, 2022).
To upscale our efforts, the Accelerator Lab continues to collaborate with the Designated Areas for Sustainable Tourism Administration (DASTA). Together with diverse partners, we are considering a portfolio of interconnected solutions to shift the tourism ecosystem to be more inclusive. The charming old town of Songkhla province in southern Thailand was selected as the pilot site to develop some of the solutions in the portfolio.
What might the portfolio for inclusive tourism look like?
Let’s take a view of a tourist, what do we need when we plan for our touristic visits? Places to visit, things to do, good food to enjoy, places to stay, to list a few. For travelers with disabilities, accessibility is the required feature that cuts across all things. Barriers to accessibility are not only physical, but there are also other types of barriers, including communication, attitudinal, and institutional barriers. Therefore, the portfolio must tackle the issue from multiple fronts and at multiple levels.
1) Physical infrastructures
Let us start with the obvious, accessible infrastructures must be in place to allow travelers with disabilities to visit. Since there are very diverse tourism-related venues – from public attractions managed by governmental entities to privately run hotels, restaurants, shops, etc., we need to work with the government as well as the private sector to build their understanding and incentivize them to invest in inclusive infrastructure.
- Experiential learning: People need to feel related to the issue as well as experience how seemingly small details e.g. a ramp too steep, obstructions on pathways, etc. can create real difficulty for people with disabilities. It is through direct experiences that people learn to care about these vital details when attempting to build inclusive infrastructure. Together with our multi-sectoral partners, the Accelerator Lab organized a training workshop that applied this experiential learning method to build understanding and empathy among governmental agencies and local entrepreneurs in Songkhla.
- People with disabilities as co-creators: No matter how much we try, we can never understand the needs and experiences of people with disabilities as much as people with disabilities themselves. Thus, it is crucial to mainstream the co-creation approach. We need everyone to engage people with disabilities as co-creators in every of the development process. Let them be the ones who highlight the problems, co-create solutions, and test them. For governmental constructions that usually have a committee to inspect the construction before completing the projects, people with disabilities should be made a part of the committee.
- Financial incentives and support: Some businesses lack the financial capital to invest in the renovation, so financial mechanisms are instrumental. A few ideas discussed with DASTA included a collaboration with banks to provide low-interest loans for inclusive tourism development, corporate social responsibility projects to subsidize efforts of SMEs, and tax incentives, among others. To test the idea, the Accelerator Lab together and DASTA have launched a competition inviting local entrepreneurs to work with students from the Rajamangala University of Technology Srivijaya’s Faculty of Architecture to design renovation plans for greater inclusiveness. Winning teams will receive an award that will serve as a subsidy for the actual renovation.
2) Inclusive tourism activities
Once the physical environment is welcoming, we also need inclusive tourism activities that everyone can enjoy regardless of their different abilities.
- Co-creation (again!): Our work in 2023 has proven that simple shifts in activity facilitation and communication can make activities accessible for all e.g. how we guide the blind to do the activity through touch. This is made possible with co-creation, having people with disabilities try out the activities and shine the light on what to be adjusted to make them inclusive. Through this process, we learn not to focus on what is ‘lacking’ but what people ‘have’. Try closing your eyes and opening up your other senses, you might be surprised by other sensory experiences…how you can appreciate the texture under your touch, or how a familiar dish tastes even better as you pay delicate attention.
- Livelihood options for local people with disabilities: In addition to thinking of them as customers, we can also explore how people with disabilities can be service providers e.g. activity facilitators, guides, etc. Inclusive tourism can provide not only a tourism experience for travelers with disabilities but also livelihood options for local people with disabilities. The Accelerator Lab and DASTA in collaboration with Songkhla Province Social Development and Human Security Office and Songkhla Association of Disabled Persons are exploring how people with disabilities in Songkhla can step up to lead and benefit from inclusive tourism in their hometown.
3) Digital tourism information
Our travel experience begins before we arrive at our destinations; we all need information to decide where to go. Travelers with disabilities need to be certain that there will be accessibility facilities and inclusive services. Digital technologies provide platforms for making this information available.
- Accessibility information on mapping and booking platforms: Travelers need reliable information on what they can expect at each destination. For people with physical disabilities, photos and videos of accessibility facilities and inclusive tourism offers need to be available on existing platforms such as Google Maps, accommodation booking websites, etc. See an example of our work with the local community in Suphanburi here.
- AI for inclusive communication: While visual materials provide much-needed evidence for people with physical disabilities, they are a barrier for people with visual impairments. It is important to consider various types of disabilities and ensure that information is accessible to all. With photos and visual presentations, we need to include ‘alt text’ which describes what the visual depicts. AI technology can facilitate this as it can quickly generate a descriptive text of any image. The power of AI in supporting inclusive development remains to be further explored. For example, we started to see applications of AI for generating sign language content for people with hearing disabilities. To promote the use of AI for inclusive tourism, the Accelerator Lab collaborated with Microsoft Thailand to create an online training course on the use of generative AI for tourism, aiming at building the digital capacity of tourism entrepreneurs in Thailand.
- Onsite information providers: As travelers arrive at their destinations, they look for information about the place, be it the history, the stories associated with the place, the facilities available, or nearby attractions. Instead of being limited by physical information boards, digital technologies offer a wide range of solutions that can include images, texts, audio descriptions for people with visual impairments, sign language content for people with hearing impairments, etc. The Accelerator Lab is supporting DASTA in exploring appropriate technologies such as Beacon (wireless technology providing push information as visitors enter the signal range) and NaviLens (a technology similar to QR codes that can be scanned with a mobile camera to provide information) to provide inclusive tourism information in Songkhla Old Town.
4) Demand side of the story
We commonly hear the argument that businesses are not motivated to change because they do not see the demand. Then, people on the other side would say that people with disabilities do not travel because the supply side is not ready and has not yet earned traveler’s trust. It is one of those ‘chicken or egg’ stories. Thus, while developing the supply side, another component in this portfolio is to encourage the active participation of people with disabilities in public spaces. A message from the chairperson of Songkhla Association of Disabled Persons was encouraging people with disabilities to come out, be visible, and communicate the needs of people with disabilities. Although event-based solutions are often unsustainable, in this context, large-scale events inviting people with disabilities to participate in public activities can be a good start for raising awareness and highlighting the demand for inclusive city development.
Reflection on system transformation for inclusive tourism
When I first learnt about system thinking, I thought of it in a very structural sense: components in the system interacting and influencing one another. Yet, as I worked on developing inclusive tourism, I started to feel very differently and found system thinking to be much more ‘organic’. For me, it is about understanding the lived experience of people involved in the system. Their pain points direct us to explore factors and interlinkages that construct the system. If we follow the trail of pain points in the human experience without limiting ourselves in a silo, we will see an interconnected picture and hints of what the portfolio of solutions needs to look like. Problems that travelers with disabilities face are connected to the inability of service providers, public and private, to offer inclusive services. That inability is connected to many other factors. Some service providers are eager to change, but they too have their pain points – from the lack of knowledge and capabilities to limited financial capital, institutional setup, and deeply rooted divisive mindset, etc.
In a way, growing a portfolio is like nurturing a garden. We need to plant diverse seeds that correspond with different needs in the space, and all of them affect one another. Our interventions need to be multi-level like how we design our garden with different layers of plants. Like grass and shrubs, we need practical local actions that yield concrete results and inspire further actions. At the same time, we also need policy work to create an enabling environment for scaling at the national level, like we need to plant perennial trees that take time to grow but will shelter us in the long run. One last thing about this garden analogy is that it reminds us to do our development work with care and empathy for the human actors in the seemingly abstract system, just like we nurture lives in our garden. With that, we should have a chance at transforming the system for a sustainable and inclusive future.
