Every hospitality business accumulates experience. Individually, each piece of experience has value. Much of that experience naturally remains within the business where it was acquired.
Increasingly, members of Accessible Hospitality Alliance (aha) are sharing their experiences with others in the aha community, exposing what they have learned to different perspectives and, in the process, increasing its potential value.
The reasons behind this growing preparedness to work together were explored in Why hospitality operators are increasingly choosing to work together on accessibility.
This raises a related but different question.
What happens to experience when it starts to travel?
Seeing the same thing differently
The aha forums bring together operator members, people with experience of barriers to hospitality and service partners. There is considerable diversity within each of those parts of the community too.
An operator may bring experience spanning people, operations, customer experience, property, technology and commercial management. Someone who experiences barriers to hospitality may also be an employee, employer, customer, specialist or business leader. A service partner can combine deep professional expertise with experience gained across numerous hospitality environments.
AccessibleUK illustrates the point particularly well. Its perspective is informed by specialist accessibility knowledge, extensive work with tourism and hospitality businesses and direct understanding of the barriers people encounter.
The perspectives within a forum consequently resist neat categorisation.
A subject that initially appears straightforward through one lens can look quite different through another.
And when several such perspectives are applied to the same question, does the original experience simply get shared, or does its meaning begin to change?
An operator describing something that has worked within its business may hear an implication it had not considered. Someone encountering a barrier may add context that alters the premise of a discussion. Specialist experience can introduce another interpretation. Another operator may recognise the issue but have encountered a different outcome.
Nobody needs to surrender their original perspective.
There is value in the interplay.
An opportunity too significant to be precious about?
A sentiment has surfaced more than once during aha forums: the opportunity greater accessibility presents is too significant to be precious about how progress is achieved.
It is worth considering what sits behind that observation.
Businesses rightly protect knowledge that provides competitive advantage. But where does competitive advantage reside when the opportunity itself can grow as more people are able to experience hospitality, and more people are able to build careers within it?
If one business develops a better understanding of a barrier, how much value lies in retaining that experience exclusively?
And might its value actually increase when somebody else interrogates it, adapts it or adds an entirely different perspective?
What is observable within the aha community is a preparedness to explore.
Operators discuss what they are doing and what they are discovering. People with experience of barriers bring perspectives that can test assumptions. Service partners contribute knowledge accumulated through their own disciplines and client work.
All three gain greater exposure to how the others see the same landscape.
From forums into businesses
The emergence of Access Champions adds another dimension to this exchange.
The idea developed through the aha forums and has since materialised through appointments across operator member businesses.
As explored in If accessibility is everyone’s responsibility, who keeps it moving?, those appointments vary considerably. Different organisations have chosen people with different responsibilities and have shaped the role around their own circumstances.
The common thread is continuity.
This creates an intriguing connection between what happens collectively and what happens individually.
Something discussed at a forum can travel back into a member business through an Access Champion. There it encounters another set of perspectives: colleagues, customers, employees, operating realities and commercial priorities.
It may be adopted, questioned, modified or discarded.
All of those outcomes create further experience.
What happens when that experience is then brought back?
The Collective changes the circulation
The formation of The Access Champions Collective in April 2026 created another route through which experience can move.
Twelve Access Champions from different aha operator members initially came together at Kimpton Fitzroy London. Their job titles, businesses and operating environments varied, while each carried some responsibility for keeping accessibility moving within their organisation.
The number of Access Champions has since grown to 27, increasing the range of perspectives within the Collective.
Much of what is shared is also retained through a portal accessible to all Access Champions. The accumulated experience therefore has a life beyond the meeting in which it first surfaced.
The interesting aspect of the Collective may be less what any individual member knows than the range of experience against which their thinking can be considered.
A question originating in one organisation can be examined by people working elsewhere. An approach developed in one operating environment can meet experience from another. Something that appears successful in one context can acquire qualifications when viewed through several others.
Could this make the boundary around organisational experience increasingly porous?
Not because businesses cease making their own decisions, but because the material informing those decisions comes from a wider field of reference.
The Access Champion takes experience into the Collective and brings different perspectives back.
Over time, that movement has the potential to become iterative.
A different question about competitive advantage
Accessibility represents a significant business opportunity for hospitality and catering, in the people businesses can welcome as customers, the people they can attract and retain as employees, and the quality of the experiences they create.
Participation exposes each part of the community to something difficult to acquire independently: a deeper understanding of the perspectives and realities of the others.
Perhaps this is where the more consequential question begins to emerge.
As businesses become increasingly sophisticated in how they think about accessibility, might they also become more discerning about which knowledge derives greater value from being protected and which derives greater value from being shared?
There are early indications within the aha community that the question is being asked.
Every participant arrives with their own experience, and leaves with some of everyone else’s too.
