What can we do to make tourism more inclusive?

Supporting inclusion is increasingly seen as the obvious or normal thing to do. Yet, when a hotel or restaurant promotes its facilities for people with disabilities, tourists without mobility limitations often hesitate to make a reservation. A study co‑authored by Volker Kuppelwieser and Aikaterini Manthiou, two professors at NEOMA Business School, highlights this unexpected paradox.

Picture the scenario: you’re planning a weekend away in the country but can’t make up your mind between two similar hotels. The price is identical, they’re in the same area and have comparable customer reviews. The only difference is that one explicitly mentions bedrooms and shared spaces that are “fully accessible to people with reduced mobility”, while the other doesn’t. We might instinctively assume that the first option would be more appealing: a hotel that is attentive to the needs of people with disabilities would be expected to enjoy a form of moral approval.

And yet, when a team of economic researchers, including NEOMA’s Volker Kuppelwieser and Aikaterini Manthiou, conducted a series of experiments, they found that tourists without disabilities expressed more ambivalent reactions. While some guests were naturally drawn to the most inclusive establishments, many others actually stayed away… precisely because they care about disability issues! In other words, as the study published in Tourism Management shows, the same altruistic motivations can prompt travellers to endorse accessibility yet also steer them away from accessible venues.

“Helping by staying away”

How can we explain this paradox? The authors identify two competing psychological mechanisms: on the one hand, customers who choose the accessible hotel see themselves as responsible travellers who support initiatives and practices that foster a more inclusive society. On the other, clients who opt not to stay there often worry about monopolising a valuable space. Doesn’t booking an accessible room mean depriving someone with genuine needs? If these potential guests assume that these options are limited in a society that tends to favour able-bodied people, they are more likely to forgo them and turn to non‑accessible establishments instead. This is what the authors call the “helping-by-staying-away paradox”.

The researchers carried out a number of experimental studies between 2023 and 2025 before arriving at this conclusion. In the first, 314 participants had to pretend they were booking a hotel in Paris. One of the establishments displayed an accessibility badge and indicated that its common areas were fully equipped for guests with reduced mobility, while the other provided no specific information. If we look at the overall results, there is no marked difference: participants selected the two hotels in comparable proportions. Accessibility does not seem to trigger any particular enthusiasm or rejection. 

But the researchers went further, seeking to better understand the participants’ motivations by asking how this information made them feel. Would choosing the accessibility-equipped hotel be a way of supporting inclusion? Or, on the contrary, would they feel they were using a resource that someone with a disability needs more than they do? The more participants replied “Yes” to the first question, the more they tended to favour the accessible hotel. By contrast, the more they worried about taking up a valuable resource, the more they avoided it. These two altruistic impulses pull in opposite directions but, on average, they cancel each other out, which makes the paradox difficult to grasp.

Scarcity of supply — only part of the picture

In further experiments, the researchers repeated the same procedure while manipulating the perceived scarcity of accessibility. When a hotel indicated that it had only one unit with accessible facilities, participants without disabilities were less likely to select it. However, this hesitation diminished when the hotel offered ten accessible units. The same logic applied to a tourist restaurant: if only two out of 15 seats were adapted to accommodate people with reduced mobility, respondents were more reluctant to book. When all the tables were adapted, however, the deterrent effect diminished.

Although these initial findings seem to argue in favour of universal accessibility, the studies that followed introduced an additional layer of nuance. In this phase, the researchers did not vary the number of accessible features but their status. Imagine two cinemas: in the first, all seats are adapted and open to everyone; in the second, some seats are explicitly reserved for people with disabilities. Which option is more appealing to non-disabled cinema-goers? Respondents tended to favour the second. The provision of reserved seats reduced their fear of taking a place that someone else might genuinely need. The sense of symbolic competition disappears — and with it, the moral tension.

The three stages of prosocial behaviour

This research raises broader questions about what the researchers call “prosocial behaviour”: a voluntary action, in other words, that is intended to help others or do good. We might naturally assume that altruistic individuals always adopt the same type of behaviour, prioritising the interests of others, backing community-minded initiatives and choosing the most ethical options. But this study demonstrates that the same prosocial motivation — prioritising accessibility for people with disabilities — can produce opposing decisions. 

In an attempt to explain this phenomenon, the authors turned to several classic theories in social psychology. Research on identity suggests that we are inclined to want to uphold a positive self-image through the groups we identify with. Choosing an inclusive hotel means we can signal, symbolically, that we belong to the community of “responsible tourists”. 

Other research on the allocation of scarce resources reveals that we have a greater concern for fairness and justice when goods are perceived as limited. Members of a majority group may then self‑restrict to avoid depriving a minority group of a resource they need more — and to avoid appearing to monopolise it. Lastly, the authors draw on the theory of moral norm activation, which posits that prosocial behaviour unfolds in three stages: awareness of a need, a sense of responsibility and the activation of a moral obligation to act.

Ambivalent altruism

These theories align around the same idea: abstaining or stepping back is not necessarily a selfish act. It may be driven by the same altruistic impulse as more assertive choices. For people working in the tourism industry, the message is threefold. First, the accessible offer must not appear as a scarce and contested resource, since this pairing provokes the greatest resistance. The more limited the accommodations seem, the greater the fear of “taking someone else's place”.

Secondly, the way these initiatives are presented is pivotal. Accessibility is most effective when embedded in the broader offer rather than framed as a separate service, and the guidelines should be clearly stated to avoid any impression of competition. The aim is to show that the accommodations are available without suggesting that they are being monopolised at the expense of people who genuinely need them.

Finally, the study argues that accessibility should be approached from a broader perspective. Adapted spaces are also valuable for older people, parents with pushchairs and travellers with temporary impairments. The more these facilities are perceived as useful to a wide range of groups, the less they appear to be resources set aside for a select few. Ultimately, inclusion depends not only on good intentions but also on how environments are designed and presented.

Find out more

Volker G. Kuppelwieser, Benedikt Schnurr and Aikaterini Manthiou, Helping by staying away: When prosocial motivations create accessibility paradoxes, Tourism Management, June 2026. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2025.105387