Tourism for All 2

Cities that have hosted Olympic Games or Expos have experienced the illusion of an increase in their number of tourists due to the event that subsequently decreased once the games or show was over. Unlike these cities, the number of tourists in Barcelona has been constantly on the increase along the years..

To achieve this Barcelona has been continually improving five main components:

• Welcoming and business oriented people.
• Reliable information
• Public spaces and facilities for all
• Offer diversity for all
• Wide process rank

However, the key common issue to these five components is the respect to any human being and capacity to adapt products, environments and services to all types of tourists' abilities and needs.

Along the speech images about how nature, urban spaces, public transport, hotels, restaurants, historical buildings, etc, have been progressively adapted to fulfill the need of all potential users are shown.

Aspects to be improved and challenges will be also discussed.

Toyoko Inn, one of the largest business hotel chains in Japan in terms of the number of business hotels it operates, drew sharp criticism from society in 2006 for illegally altering and compromising its barrier-free facilities. Taking this experience to heart, Toyoko Inn established Universal Design Committee by inviting experts from the outside and has been working on the development of UD guestrooms and improvement of its guest service systems.

Due to lax laws and regulations, Japan has lagged significantly in making accommodation facilities barrier-free, and only a handful of hotels have made efforts from the UD perspective. At Toyoko Inn, 86% of its hotels now have UD guestrooms. Moreover, it is now commonplace for its hotel to have more than one UD guestroom. Its future challenge is to evolve into a hotel chain that can offer a wide range of options to the guests, not only by providing UD guestrooms, but also by enhancing the quality of its regular guestrooms.

As a result of the active efforts made by Toyoko Inn, a major business hotel chain in Japan, in introducing UD, Japanese business hotels are now beginning to change significantly in terms of UD.

I will report on Toyoko Inn's efforts to introduce UD.