Despite European accessibility regulations now in their second year of enforcement, millions of disabled air travelers continue navigating a system that leaves them exhausted and skeptical of promised change, according to a new study from Breda University of Applied Sciences.
The research, published in Research in Transportation Business & Management, examined the complete journey of passengers with diverse disabilities—wheelchair users, people with visual or hearing impairments, and those with invisible disabilities like autism and anxiety disorders. Researchers tracked every touchpoint from online booking through baggage claim, documenting not just where systems fail, but how those failures compound into patterns that undermine trust.
Roughly one in four adults in the European Union—approximately 90 million people—experience some form of disability. As summer travel season approaches and aviation demand continues its upward trajectory, the sector faces a critical choice: either fundamentally redesign how it serves disabled passengers, or accept that it is systematically excluding a quarter of Europe's population from an essential service.
Researchers identified what they term the "cumulative obstacle effect." A forgotten accommodation note at booking. A gate agent who fails to relay disability information during check-in. A damaged mobility device discovered mid-journey. None of these individual incidents is catastrophic on its own. Taken together, they create a grinding pattern of degradation that exhausts passengers long before they reach their destination.
"There are many regulations and standards, but difficulties persist," said Simone Moretti, senior researcher in the Tourism Impacts on Society program at Breda. "The aviation sector has good intentions, but offering consistent, quality service requires more than compliance. You have to truly understand what these passengers experience."
The research team advocates for what it calls "co-creation"—actively involving disabled passengers in designing new services and infrastructure rather than imposing accessibility solutions from above. The aviation industry has operated under a false dichotomy: uniform safety standards or individual adaptability. The research suggests that framework is outdated.
A standardized protocol for transmitting accessibility information from booking through baggage claim would create predictability without requiring custom solutions for every passenger. Pre-flight communication from airlines to ground crews could be systematized yet flexible enough to accommodate varying mobility needs. Crew training could emphasize passenger agency and dignity rather than treating disability accommodations as exceptions to standard procedure.
The obstacles are not primarily technical but structural—embedded in how the industry has historically trained staff, organized workflows, and communicated across departments. A wheelchair passenger doesn't need a unique solution at each airport; they need the same reliability that non-disabled passengers expect as standard.
Brussels-based regulations clearly intend to mandate this kind of consistency. But regulation alone has proven insufficient. The gap between legal requirements and actual practice reveals that rules without systemic redesign function mainly as liability shields rather than catalysts for genuine change.
The Breda research team, working through the INCLAVI (Inclusive Aviation) project—an EU Erasmus+ funded initiative involving multiple European universities—has developed practical responses. They've created free training for aviation professionals designed to shift how the sector understands accessibility: not as an additional burden layered onto normal operations, but as a fundamental redesign of those operations themselves.
This approach aligns with broader trends in disability justice. Accessibility was historically treated as accommodation—a special provision for exceptional cases. The modernized framework treats accessibility as universal design: systems built from the ground up to serve diverse human bodies and minds. A curb cut designed for wheelchair users benefits parents with strollers, elderly travelers with mobility limitations, and people with luggage. Clear signage that accommodates vision disabilities helps all passengers navigate more easily. Standardized procedures for disability information benefit the entire operation through reduced confusion and errors.
The aviation sector's current approach treats disability as a problem to be managed rather than a reality to be designed around. Passengers with disabilities don't need airlines to be more sympathetic; they need airlines to be more systematic. They need processes that work reliably, staff trained to execute those processes with consistency, and genuine input into how those systems are built.
Over the next decade, air travel demand is projected to grow substantially. Without intervention, the sector will lock in exclusion at scale. Conversely, using the next few years to build accessibility into operational design could create a model that other sectors adopt.
True systemic change requires sustained commitment from airlines, airports, and regulatory bodies. It demands that disabled passengers be consulted not as afterthoughts but as essential designers of the systems they depend on. It requires training that goes beyond compliance checklists to cultivate genuine understanding of what disability accessibility means in practice.
The study offers a clear diagnosis and a viable remedy. The aviation industry isn't failing because the challenge is impossible. It's failing because the sector has approached accessibility as an add-on rather than a foundation.
