TravelAbility to Launch Grant Lab, Accessibility Catalog at 2026 Summit
Jake Steinman
By Jordan Bradley
TravelAbility, the leading industry advocate for accessible travel and travelers with disabilities, will connect attendees of this year’s summit to two new offerings: a grant lab designed to help destination management professionals navigate grant applications for accessibility upgrades, and a catalog of affordable accessibility tech and solutions.
The annual three-day conference heads to the Hilton Tampa Downtown in Florida from November 9–11. This year, the conference’s theme is “Make Accessibility Your 2030 Differentiator.”
The theme highlights a benchmark that sits just around the corner for all destinations: by 2030, every member of the Baby Boomer generation will be at least 65 years old.
“We’re creating a grant lab at TravelAbility in Tampa, so we’re focusing on educating DMOs on how they can get grants and what they need to do to get grants around accessibility, which departments that goes through,” TravelAbility founder and CEO Jake Steinman told USAE.
The lab will be made possible through a partnership between TravelAbility and Grant Logic AI, a statistical analysis system (SAS) artificial intelligence model that helps cut down the amount of time it takes to find aligned grants. During the lab, DMO attendees at the summit will be able to speak with grant writers, consultants and funders, and attend workshops centered on successful grant applications.
Destinations with relevant experience with grants will also offer insights through a workshop into their successes and processes in the pursuit of grant funding to support accessibility improvements, Steinman said.
Steinman said the inspiration for this year’s summit theme, the grant lab and the accessibility tech catalog stem from observations he and the TravelAbility team made over the eight years of the summit’s lifetime.
After a summit ended, Steinman said he noticed a pattern with destination management attendees.
“They leave the conference—they’re motivated; they’re like spring-loaded to do something,” Steinman told USAE. “Then they get back to the office and they don’t have a plan, and budgets are being cut back because of hotel tax revenues and other things.”
So Steinman started digging. He looked at some of the strongest examples of accessible cities, regions and states, including North Alabama; Oregon; Tampa and Fort Lauderdale; and Mesa, Arizona.
“These are destinations that have invested in accessibility infrastructure around information, and in some cases, subsidizing improvements,” Steinman said, adding that DMOs have been telling TravelAbility over the years that “they’ve been involved in sustainability and climate change and all these other feel-good initiatives, but nothing comes close to accessibility because it affects their local population more than anything else.”
But DMOs are designed to market a destination, not handle the infrastructure for its local community, Steinman said.
“We do not ask the tourism bureau to pave municipal roads or run the city buses. Yet, accessibility has quietly become the exception,” Steinman wrote in a July 13 op-ed. “Destinations are being asked to build accessible communities out of shrinking marketing budgets, covering much of the cost of innovations in physical infrastructure whose heaviest users are the people who live there.”
So the ideas for the TravelAbility Grant Lab and tech catalog were born to assist destinations in gaining and stretching funds as far as possible to support accessibility updates to a destination.
In addition, keeping individuals mobile and independent has a significant return on any investment made in accessibility infrastructure, and it’s important for destinations to steward the wave of change, Steinman said.
“It’s turning the whole thing around as a taxpayer savings is contributing to the ROI,” Steinman told USAE. “If we can keep 100 people independent for one more year, [destinations] are saving $7.5 billion in taxpayer savings.”
Outside of the financial implications of updating destination infrastructure with increased accessibility in mind, Steinman said, “You’re investing in somebody’s dignity.
That’s really what it is. You lose your dignity when you move into assisted living. No question about that.”
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