Disability Awareness / Equality Training

EU 1107 - Access to Air Travel for Disabled Persons

People are often concerned about meeting and helping disabled people. They are afraid of doing or saying the wrong thing and solve the problem by not doing anything at all. That in itself is discriminatory. Disability Equality Training provides an opportunity to explore these fears and concerns and find out more about disability and realise that providing a service to disabled people is essentially common sense, courtesy and good customer care.

Why your customers will benefit

Service and hospitality are the cornerstones of any service providers business. How we meet, greet, and communicate with customers is so important. Training in these hosting skills is pretty much the accepted norm in most businesses today, but in order to successfully manage the customer journey for disabled people from airport car park to aircraft seat, specific disability awareness and equality training for management and staff should be adopted as part of any staff induction or ongoing training strategy.

Why your business will benefit

There are 10 million disabled people in the UK, more than 50 million in Europe and hundreds of millions more globally. That represents a lot of 'traffic' through UK airports. All have individual needs, desires and requirements. It is also known that 25% of the population have some care related responsibility for a disabled person - this is a major section of society and a huge potential market. The high level of repeat business in our own travel and leisure businesses is evidence that disabled customers, their friends and relatives, will display loyalty to a service where their needs are understood and actions are taken to ensure that these needs are met. Disability Awareness Training will greatly enhance the quality of service you and your personnel can provide and this will almost certainly result in improved staff morale, customer satisfaction, and bottom line profit.

And the law…

One of the suggested ‘reasonable adjustments’ included in the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 1995 is to provide formal ‘Disability Awareness Training’ and ‘DDA Training’ for appropriate personnel. If a possible case of discrimination does take place and there is no record that training has been given, then your business will be liable. EU 1107, Access to Air Travel for Disabled Persons goes further and essentially makes such training mandatory for "all staff dealing directly with the travelling public must receive disability awareness and disability equality training".

The question is not whether, but when to deliver such training.

Access Auditors popular ‘Disability Equality Training’ covers:

Defining disability
Misconceptions and myths about disability
Disability etiquette
What disabled people may expect from airport operators
Marketing and promoting your accessible airport services and amenities

We offer a range of workshops, seminars, and briefings to suit the needs of your business.

Interactive training solutions

‘Interact’ is a unique interactive training package ideally suited to airport and tour operators with a high number of staff that interact with customers. Using a combination of video, workbook and online activity, this training tool enables up to 30 staff staff to be trained for approximately £10 per person. That is an amazingly cost effective solution, which will enable employers to address their obligations under the DDA and EU 1107.