Universal Design in Norwegian Tourism Services for Customer Engagement

Abstract

Going on holiday and exploring new territories are one of many popular human activities. This type of activity usually requires a certain type of physical ability due to the condition of travel destination. However, according to the World Health Organization 15% of the world's population has some form of disability. In addition, the population trend leans toward an aging population in the future, which leads to lower physical abilities of this group of people. Consequently it becomes important to be able to participate in this type of activity in any form of ability. Thus Universal Design in Tourism or Accessible tourism for all has become a popular topic in recent year. Nearly 24% of the population of Norway has some form of disability, and through a survey it said that they could not find enough information about possible universally designed services at their desired destination.

This leads to the research idea about to use universal design to assure quality of Norwegian tourism services to encourage people use these services. Here, the usage of "Universal Design for Customer Engagement Toolkit" provides a comprehensive best practice guidance on achieving better customer communication. This thesis will use this toolkit to evaluate some sample services in order to figure out how Universal Design could assure the quality of Norwegian tourism services to improve customer engagement.