Accessibility features on your listing

Visit Exeter, alongside Visit England and Access and Inclusion UK, are working to improve the accessibility information provided to our visitors. Together it is our aim to ensure tourist destinations, products, and services are accessible to all people, regardless of their physical or intellectual limitations, disabilities or age.

In order to do this effectively, we need to update information about what you, as businesses, offer and how we can showcase that information to visitors and customers.

What is accessibility?

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) is a topic being addressed by an increasing number of businesses. Simply put, accessibility is all about removing all barriers to promote positive and equal experiences for all. It is the ‘actionable’ part of ensuring that EDI is on the agenda for disabled people in particular, but can also provide great benefit to customers and colleagues who might identify differently.

Equality - ensuring everyone can access the same opportunities

Diversity - valuing the differences between people and their identifying characteristics

Inclusion - a measure of how safe and welcome people feel in their environment

To truly be effective, accessible tourism should involve the delivery of accessible products, services and environments and enable people with impairments and accessibility requirements to have independence and autonomy over their experience.

Image - Haldon Forest Park

Why is it important to my business?

There are many reasons why being accessible is important to your business and how it can help welcome more visitors. Here's our top ten:

1. Improving customer service and the visitor experience
2. Meeting and exceeding the needs of underserved markets i.e. disabled visitors
3. Responding to changing markets and demographics i.e. an ageing population
4. Tapping into the growth of '3G' family holidays and breaks (where three generations of a family travel together)
5. Ensuring that valuable business is not lost as one person with accessibility requirements can influence a whole group/family travel plans
6. Contributing to sustainable and respinsible tourism product development
7. Growing visitor numbers, bth domestically and inbound
8. Creating job opportunities for disabled people
9. Boosting the image of your business
10. Return visit and advocates for your business

Updating your listing

The deadline for completing your form(s) is Friday 11th July 2025. If you do not fill out your relevant form(s) by the deadline then any accessibility facilities you currently have will disappear, and you will not feature on any accessibility pages and searches across the website.

Please note, the website will only display features for your business that you select ‘yes’ for, for example if you do not have facilities for assistance dogs, then no reference to this will be published.

The following are not included in this questionnaire as they are statutory responsibilities, which should be provided as standard:

- assistance dogs welcome; 

- information on the 14 major allergens in any food provided, along with food labeling requirements.

Top 5 tips for completing the questionnaire

• Be completely honest - if you have any doubt about a feature then don't tick the box

• Read the guidance - follow the guidance for each specific question

• Review regularly - to ensure the information remains accurate, update your information whenever you make a change and review the answers at least annually

• You must add your url from Visit Exeter and not your own url/web address e.g. https://www.visitexeter.com/things-to-do/exeter-cathedral-p130543

• If you have multiple listings on our Visit Exeter website then you will need to complete a seperate form for each of these listings. If you also feature on other sites (eg. Visit Devon), you will also need to complete a different form each time. 

These facilities have been developed with VisitEngland and other partners in the UK with extensive research to identify the most important features that people need to know in order to travel. These new facilities aim to build standardised facilities and feature sets across all tourism websites, including OTAs such as Booking.com and AirBnB etc.

We are kindly asking all of our member businesses to fill in a short, easy to use questionnaire, (which should only take between 3-5 minutes to complete), letting us know what are the key accessibility features that you currently offer for people with accessibility requirements. Please select the relevant form from the list below and follow the instructions.

Serviced accommodation

Self-catering accommodation

Attractions and experiences

Food and drink

Events, festivals and shows

Camping, glamping and holiday parks

What else is needed?

We're always on the lookout for lovely, inclusive images showing visitors enjoying your attraction, accommodation, restaurant, shop or experience. These can be shared across our website, social media channels as well as for press and media, visitor guides and more, so please feel free to get in contact with us.

As well as completing your form, now is also a good time to check your website page is showing all the latest and accurate information for potential visitors to view. Not only will this help your visitors find the information in different ways, search engines will be able to pick up on this, making it more likely that someone will go straight to your business listing when looking for certain information. Plus, it helps our team here at Visit Exeter know about what you offer so that we can better promote you and add you to relevant pages, blogs, newsletters and social media posts.

Further information

If you are seeking any further information to help welcome visitors with accessibility requirements, check out VisitEngland’s Accessible and Inclusive Tourism Toolkit for Businesses. This includes practical tips and action checklists specific to your business type and technical built environment guidance for when new-build, refurbishment, conversion, and adaptation projects are possible.