An Etourism Portal for the Disabled Tourism Market in Europe: The Ossate Portal Design (One-stop-shop for Accessible Tourism)

This paper identifies the technical challenges and requirements for building and operating a comprehensive eService and platform for servicing the disabled traveller market. The OSSATE ePortal will integrate information related to accessible tourism venues which is currently scatted in a wide number of service providers and will support reservation facilities. The portal requires synergies between eBusiness, eTourism, eGovernment and eCitizen services and demands a high degree of standardisation and interconnectivity. The most critical technical challenges are illustrated, namely: Interoperability, Accessibility and Personalisation. The Business Modelling supporting this service is also demonstrated showing that the sustainability of the service relies on the eAdoption prerequisites addressed both by tourism suppliers (especially SMEs), and consumers with disabilities. OSSATE aims to achieve that by providing digitised, multi-lingual mechanisms for sharing and distributing information about accessibility across local, regional and national boundaries strengthening the competitiveness of tourism destinations and venues.