Accessible tourism: disabled Korean globetrotter blazes trail for travellers with disabilities, and Seoul has heard the message

Hong Seo-yoon manoeuvres through shifting clusters of picture-snapping tourists outside Deoksugung, a palace in downtown Seoul. Before passing through the former royal residence’s wooden gate, she adjusts her motorised wheelchair’s speed ahead of a gradual incline in the stone walkway that leads to a tree-lined courtyard.

Even small modifications, such as replacing a step with sloping pavement, gives people like Hong access to places that otherwise would have been difficult or impossible to enter independently, she says.

Hong, 32, says able-bodied people are often unaware that when it comes to tourism, sightseeing or even extreme sports, many disabled people, whether they are blind, deaf or use a wheelchair, all want the same things as other travellers.

“They want to travel, they want to visit places. I don’t think there’s a difference,” she says. “Having a disability is not something special or weird.”

Hong is the founder of Tourism for All Korea, a non-profit organisation that advocates for greater inclusion in the tourism industry for people with a disability and makes policy recommendations for improvements in this sector. She is also author of Europe, there’s no reason not to go, the first travelogue written by a wheelchair user from her country.