Travel Is for EveryBody
By April Day Garcia
A man has an accident and suddenly becomes a wheelchair user, and the first thing he thinks about isn't the chair. It's his father.
His father is aging quickly and lives in another state. He hasn't seen him in over a year, and now he wants to fly out, sit across from him at the kitchen table one more time before that chance is gone. But now there's a wheelchair, airports, Ubers, and logistics he's never had to think about before, and no one to tell him how it works.
So he doesn't go.
That story isn't hypothetical. It's a version of something I heard over and over, first as an occupational therapy assistant, then as a travel advisor: people who wanted to move through the world but had quietly stopped believing they could.
I spent more than a decade as an OTA watching people lose their independence and ultimately their choice. My job was to bridge the gap between what someone could do right now and what they wanted to do. That mindset followed me when I transitioned into travel.
I started an accessible travel agency to transition out of clinical care while still putting my OT skillset to use, and what I found in the travel industry shocked me.
Travelers with disabilities were spending thousands of dollars on trips where "accessible" was more of a buzzword than a reality. They were calling travel advisors for help and getting someone who didn't know enough to ask the right questions, because no one had ever taught them how disability actually impacts real people in the real world.
The amount of accessibility education travel professionals receive is minimal and ineffective, leaving advisors to navigate complex client needs using inconsistent supplier descriptions, vague labels, and their best guesses. Or they Google it. Or worse, they turn those clients away entirely.
That isn't fair to advisors. And it's far less fair to travelers.
That's why my co-founder Michelle Balcarcel and I created Be Brave Travel Academy. As occupational therapy professionals, we saw an opportunity to bring clinical thinking into an industry that desperately needed it. Together, we have over twenty years of experience helping people navigate a world that wasn't designed for them. BBTA's courses translate clinical expertise into practical, advisor-friendly language, giving travel professionals a real framework for planning accessible trips with confidence.
But we're not building a training company. We're building a different future for the travel industry. We're here to challenge an assumption that has gone unquestioned for too long: that accessibility is a niche.
It's not.
More than 61 million adults in the United States live with some form of disability, representing a $58 billion travel market that remains almost entirely underserved. Add aging travelers, temporary injuries, chronic illness, and neurodivergence, and accessibility affects far more people than most realize. Something that impacts nearly one in four Americans should never be treated as a specialty.
It should be the standard.
Our goal isn't just to train travel advisors. It's to help build an industry where accessibility is expected, understood, and built into every stage of planning.
Because when travel becomes accessible, people gain more than a vacation. They gain experiences. Connection. Opportunity.
That man who wanted to see his father deserved someone who had the answers.
Someone who could tell him how to request airline assistance, what his rights are, and how to make that trip not just possible, but safe and dignified.
Because accessibility is really about one thing:
Choice.
And everyone deserves the freedom to choose where their next journey takes them.
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