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TFA Trustees Ray Veal and Antonella Vecchio attended the Simpleview EMEA Summit Conference 2025 in Brighton last week.
Simpleview, a Granicus company is the leading supplier of Destination Management Systems (DMSs) and digital solutions, with destination clients across the UK. TFA’s Travel Planner website www.tourismforall.co.uk and our Charity microsite run on Simpleview’s platform.
We see destinations as key to improving and promoting accessibility for tourists and travellers in the UK. With their ability to bring together and present businesses within the wider destination context, they are perfectly positioned to help travellers with access needs plan co-ordinated, end-to-end trips, rather than just a series of individual experiences.
It was great to meet so many members of Simpleview’s destination client community and to hear about the latest developments and trends in destination marketing and in the services which Simpleview can provide. Meeting and sharing with Matt, our account manager, was definitely one of the highlights of the Summit.
Ross Calladine (of VisitEngland) and Tina Veater (of Simpleview) updated attendees on the status of the initiatives which VisitEngland have been leading, to identify the Key Accessibility Features which tourists and travellers with access needs look for, to capture information on these features from businesses and to present this information to potential visitors through destination and other websites, and to encourage businesses to develop detailed Accessibility Guides with the support of AccessAble.
As the UK’s leading DMS supplier, Simpleview has a crucial role to play in ensuring that these initiatives succeed. Tina confirmed that Simpleview has made the modifications to its systems which will present the Key Accessibility Features in a way which allows potential visitors to use them as filters in their searches and which will present more detailed accessibility information, including Accessibility Guides where these are available.
Tina also shared the exciting news that all of the businesses featured on TFA’s Travel Planner website www.tourismforall.co.uk have provided details of their Key Accessibility Features and that TFA’s Travel Planner will be the first Simpleview client site on which the facilities to display and filter the Key Accessibility Features, and to present more detailed access information, will be presented. TFA’s Travel Planner will showcase the enhancements which have been made to all of Simpleview’s clients. Watch this space for details of when the enhancements will go live.
One conference session was given over to a series of ‘roundtable’ discussions, designed to enable destinations to share issues, experiences and best practice. Ray co-hosted the discussions on Accessibility, and it was fascinating to speak to destinations who are at different stages of the accessibility journey and to hear about the opportunities they can see and the challenges they face.
TFA is working in partnership with Simpleview to deliver a webinar for Simpleview’s destination clients, which will hopefully help to quantify some of the opportunities and to address some of the challenges. We will discuss the economic benefit that accessibility can deliver to businesses and the opportunity it presents for destinations to add genuine value to their members.
The webinar “Accessible Tourism, Economic Opportunity – The value of accessibility for destinations” will take place on Thursday 18th November 2025 at 11.00am. Click here to register.
