What Sustainability Can Teach Hospitality About Accessibility: By Denis Sheehan, Publisher, H&C News
The businesses that learn early usually lead later is one of the clearest lessons hospitality can take from the journey of sustainability. What was once regarded by many as a specialist, even esoteric, subject has become part of the operating language of serious hospitality businesses. Energy, waste, procurement, reporting, certification, supply chains, investment, recruitment and brand reputation are now all touched by sustainability. It did not become mainstream overnight. It moved through a lifecycle.
The question now is whether accessibility is beginning a similar journey.
The comparison should be handled carefully. Accessibility is not sustainability by another name. Sustainability is concerned with environmental, social and governance responsibility. Accessibility is concerned with human participation: how people arrive, enter, communicate, work, stay, meet, eat, return and belong. But while the subjects are different, the business pattern may be similar.
In its early stage, sustainability sat at the margins of many hospitality businesses. It was often associated with committed individuals, specialist language and selected initiatives rather than whole-business discipline. Then came early adopters who saw more than reputational value. They embedded sustainability into culture, operations, capital decisions, procurement and measurement. Over time, credibility became important. Claims needed evidence. Certification, data and reporting became more significant. Eventually, sustainability moved from point of difference to business expectation.
That journey matters because early advantage compounded. Harvard Business School research into high-sustainability companies found that businesses which had adopted sustainability policies early significantly outperformed comparable low-sustainability companies over the long term, both in stock market and accounting measures. Hospitality-specific research by Manisha Singal, published in Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, also found a positive link between environmental sustainability investment and future financial performance in hospitality and tourism firms.
The lesson is not that sustainability automatically made businesses more profitable. It is more precise than that. Businesses that treated sustainability as operational competence, rather than communication, gave themselves time to learn. They built internal knowledge before it became expensive to catch up. They understood the subject before customers, investors, regulators and corporate buyers asked harder questions.
Accessibility now appears to be at an earlier point on a comparable curve. Too often, it is still treated as a compliance matter, a facilities issue or a goodwill gesture. That is too narrow. Accessibility increasingly touches customer choice, employee participation, event selection, destination competitiveness, corporate procurement, brand trust and the ageing of the population.
The scale is not marginal. The World Health Organization estimates that 1.3 billion people, around 16% of the global population, experience significant disability. In the UK, the most recent Purple Pound estimate, calculated by the University of Bristol’s Personal Finance Research Centre and the Money Advice Trust, places the combined annual spending power of households with at least one disabled person at £446 billion. In tourism, VisitBritain estimates annual tourism expenditure in England by people with an impairment, or those travelling in a group where someone has an impairment, at £14.6 billion.
Those figures should not be used crudely. Disabled people are not a market segment to be “targeted” as if all needs, preferences and experiences are the same. But the numbers do challenge a persistent misconception: accessibility is not a small issue. It affects a large and diverse population, their families, colleagues, friends and employers. In hospitality, one inaccessible experience rarely excludes only one person.
There is another lesson from sustainability: language can run ahead of reality. As sustainability became mainstream, some businesses learned the language faster than they changed the operation. Accessibility carries the same risk. A hotel, restaurant, venue or employer may want to describe itself as accessible before it has properly examined the guest journey, employee journey or event experience from the perspective of people who face barriers.
That is where early adopters have the greatest opportunity. The advantage will not come from louder claims. It will come from deeper competence: listening to lived experience, appointing internal champions, improving staff confidence, making better design decisions, measuring progress, sharing learning and treating accessibility as part of everyday hospitality rather than an exception to it.
The sustainability lifecycle also shows that what begins as differentiation can become baseline expectation. Businesses that moved early had time to shape culture and capability. Businesses that waited often had to respond later under pressure, with less credibility and at greater cost. Accessibility may follow the same route. Today, serious action can still distinguish a hospitality business. In future, inaction may distinguish it for the wrong reason.
The point is not to declare that accessibility is the new sustainability. That would be too neat. The better point is that sustainability shows how hospitality can misread a subject at the beginning, then later recognise it as central to performance, reputation and resilience.
Accessibility is not waiting for permission to become commercially relevant. The signals are already visible. The businesses that recognise them early will not merely be seen to care. They will be better prepared for the hospitality market that is already forming.
The businesses that learn early usually lead later.
