CACTUS CACTUS J Tour Bus Manag Econ CACTUS – Journal of Tourism Business, Management and Economics 2247-3297 ASE Publishing House Bucharest, Romania cactus-2026-48 Methodological/Analytical Paper Z38 Z32 L83 TOWARDS AN INCLUSIVE TOURISM EXPERIENCE IN THE EUROPEAN UNION: ACCESSIBILITY, SERVICES AND THE EUROPEAN ACCESSIBILITY ACT TSELEGIDIS KYRIAKOS https://orcid.org/0009-0006-0855-8780 ktselegk@hotmail.gr University of West Attica 6 11 2026 8 2 4102026 20102026 22102026 Copyright © 2026, The Author(s) 2026 The Author(s) This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

<p><em>The European Accessibility Act (Directive (EU) 2019/882) has applied through national implementing measures since 28 June 2025 to specified products and services relevant to travel. This paper examines the relationship between those legal duties and the conditions required for an inclusive tourism experience. It combines doctrinal analysis of EU and international instruments with a purposive, non-systematic synthesis of 14 peer-reviewed tourism studies, selected for their relevance to accessibility, digital information and the traveler journey. The provisions of the Directive are mapped against five stages of travel and distinguished from technical-standard provisions and voluntary management measures. The assessment identifies concentrated regulatory coverage in e-commerce and selected passenger-transport functions, but no general EU-wide physical-accessibility regime for accommodation and attractions under the Act. It develops a three-level interpretive framework separating regulatory accessibility, functional accessibility and lived inclusion, and specifies different units of assessment and forms of evidence for each level. Particular attention is given to EN 301 549 V4.1.1 (2026), its adoption of WCAG 2.2 and its status relative to standards cited in EU law. The paper offers an approach to evaluating accessibility across interconnected tourism services without treating managerial recommendations as legal obligations or conceptual findings as empirically validated outcomes.</em></p>

 Keywords disability digital services traveller journey universal design social inclusion

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