2.1. Philosophical—Philoscopical Inquiry
First of all, the specific philosophical “analytics”: the scrutiny is of a philoscopic character, which refers, on the one hand, to the application of existing knowledge to its placement in a new context and the discovery of new interfaces, and on the other hand, to the re-interpretation of thinking, and closely related to this, of the concepts of the process of creation—and finally draws attention to the need of repeated re-discovery of all these [
6,
7].
Thomas Kuhn in his main work, the revolutionary book
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2012) [
8], emphasises the following changes of the base structure in connection with paradigm shifts (without aiming at completion): in his definition, dominant “research directions” are those frameworks accepted and used by the mainstream (with a modern expression) which determine the research trends and methodology of a given discipline. A paradigm shift takes place when dominant opinion-makers of a scientific community, in their personalities and ways of thinking—i.e., theories and applied “actions”—specify new focal points significantly different from the previous ones, and when this new “cartography” of the scrutinies replaces the previous ones.
This brief science philosophy and history outlook challenges the intention of the authors to trigger a paradigm shift, knowing that Kuhn’s model of a paradigm shift can mostly be related to large distances in time and space within academic life. Furthermore, the change of the main research directions and statements takes into account, as a basis condition, the initial resistance of the group active in the given discipline and seeing itself as the elite; this is just why it can be called revolutionary [
9].
The authors of this paper, connecting to the philosophical thoughts of Feyerabend, believe that Kuhn’s science philosophy paradigm in itself should have been revolutionarily altered at the very beginning of its creation and publication, considering that it accepts the existence of the prevailing paradigm as self-evident, and that the academic structure replacing it integrates those partial elements of the replaced philosophy that it considers relevant, then having itself elevated to the “pulpit” of the previous one, as a new dominant way of thinking, by the old-new elite of the academics dominant in the scientific community.
In the frameworks of this paper, paradigms are seen as relevant to, but not rivalling, the formalised knowledge collection and analysis systems with science philosophy foundations that are related not hierarchically to each other but to the possible ways of examining respective disciplines [
10,
11].
Neither providing accessibility nor being accessible seems to have achieved the right of sovereign existence in any discipline. This is also true for disability science focused on the two areas mentioned above. Even the experts of this relatively novel research field see technical accessibility as a sort of responsibility that derives from the level of development of a society, and it is basically the possibility of the technical implementation that is seen as researchable and relevant. The authors hereby remark that in the second part of the paper, a section that is focused on the analysis of the findings of a questionnaire survey compatible with the mainstream research methodologies conducted in five European countries with a specific focus on the travel habits of people with disabilities, an attempt will be made for the discovery of the practical, analysable and measurable (also by travel sciences) aspects of the philosophical differences of fundamental accessibility (no barriers at all) and technical accessibility (creating this state). Finally, the authors draw attention to the still overwhelmingly negative consequence of differentiating fundamental accessibility from technical accessibility.
It should be more appropriate to talk about a paradigm-making intention in this duality of accessibility (fundamental and technical accessibility) since paradigms are considered resilient frameworks, among other things [
4,
12].
The necessity of the shift indicated in the title of the paper, however, is also evident, as regards the further thinking of the philosophical anthropology of man. In several previously published papers (e.g., [
6]), authors projected a more detailed elaboration and mapping of the character of humans, providing technical accessibility. From the aspects of the science of travel, both philosophy-based extensions of concepts and approaches are synergic, considering that modern-age travel behaviour and the horizon of technical accessibility of the supply, built on this and said to be experience-generating, is becoming a more and more researched area in both the Hungarian and international literature [
13]. As the COVID-19 pandemic created extra time for both the expansion and the deepening of our previous research foci, it can be said that the interpretation area of full accessibility used by the authors, and recommended to be used by a broader research community, can partially or fully re-write the relationship of humans as creatures travelling in existence [
14], and Homo sapiens sapiens, a creature wishing to get experiences in space, to the nature that these creatures think that they rule.
The starting point is the brief statement of the philosophical interpretation frameworks of the three thinkings, focusing on the (1) existential philosophy approach: [
15,
16,
17,
18] who primarily describe, and apply in their philosophies, the travel dimensions of the experience of existence implicitly, which is an approach that is preferred by the authors of the paper. The authors are also aware, though, that, e.g., Sartre [
19] and Lévi-Strauss [
20], and even Merleau-Ponty [
21], explicitly featured travel during their works, but their approach is less favoured in this paper because the authors’ primary objective is not a contribution to the philosophy of travel but to focus on the holistic relationship between travel and philosophy. Social philosophy interpretations were not included in the scrutinies of the paper, either, for the same reason. It must be remarked that the authors could not, and did not want to, outline a complex “anthology” of Western philosophies (also for the mere lack of space), as such an endeavour would require at least three extended papers. (2) Attention was also paid to applied philosophy [
5,
9] and last, but not least, to (3) the essence of the Buddhist worldview [
22,
23]. All three philosophical approaches and dimensions introduced by the authors contain an explicit and implicit form the originally symbiotic organogram of both humans creating technical accessibility and the notion of fundamental accessibility.
Heidegger’s masterpiece
Being and Time is one of the most important works of European philosophy since Plato and Aristotle [
24]; this “travel book” is basically an ontological approach to discovering existence—as the authors see, Heidegger’s essay entitled “The end of philosophy and the task of thinking” [
25] explicitly contains the ontological necessity of the practice of travelling, the positions of the relationship of humans and existence to, as it could be said now, a post-metaphysical level, i.e., it considers the duality of existence and existing, taken as natural, to be simply artificial. Heidegger, just for this reason, dates the end of philosophy to the “appearance” of Socrates. The reason for Heidegger doing this is the fact that in his interpretation, it was after Socrates that among European philosophers the metaphysical view was born, according to which humans, as existing creatures, interpret themselves in existence, as an independent and sovereign component thereof [
26]. With all due respect, the authors must challenge Heidegger’s conclusions, as they have come to the conclusion, just with the analysis of one of the original statements of Plato’s philosophy, that the travelling character of humans can be “justified” as their basic existential characteristic from both epistemological and ontological aspects.
The loss of the symbiotic human figure manifested in the androgynous view of Plato’s philosophy sort of predestines humans for travel in existence in the following way. The former single unit split by divine wrath keeps on searching for their companion [
27]. In this interpretation, humans are also travelling creatures in a philosophical sense. Of course, the male–female dichotomy that has probably piled as cultural alluvium upon the original image does not meet the original philosophical message; the academy-founding Greek philosopher may have referred to the appearance of the dichotomy of the intellectual and physical entities defined later in Hegel’s works [
28].
Actually, giving a new meaning of hermeneutical character defined in the above paragraph, although it contains some criticism concerning Heidegger, is still directly linked to the philosophical guideline of the “philosopher of the Black Forest”, since we cannot be satisfied with merely rewording the messages of texts; instead, we must strive for the discovery of the original source again and again, when interpreting a certain idea and conceptual framework [
29].
On this basis, similarly to Heidegger, Jaspers and Bergson, the authors also interpret the practical and theoretical frameworks of philosophy as the intellectual maxima of the nature-discovering character of humans. In this practice-oriented mode, further elaborated upon and called
philoscopic by the authors [
7], the examiner and the examinee do not differ from each other, i.e., the real distinction of ontology and epistemology is just as unimaginable as the existence of the meta-world separated from the physical world. Thus, metaphysics is an artificial concept that has basically receded from the original source [
30], the rediscovery of which was defined by Heidegger as an indispensable hermeneutical task [
17]. We note that it is far beyond the scope of this paper to look more closely at Derrida’s ideas on deconstruction, which the authors argue are directly related to the ‘philosophy of being’ in the philosophy of emptiness, and thus go well beyond the message of Heidegger and Gadamer on the need to discover the original source. It is well known that Derrida is not satisfied with merely examining the origin of concepts from being, because, according to him, concepts do not stand in a stable, so to speak substantive and unidirectional relation to being, but rather, when a new point of connection is discovered, we are constantly witnessing new points of connection, building on and interconnecting with each other [
31]. Last but not least, it should be noted that, beyond the view of emptiness, the practised philosopher may also discover a close connection with the philosophical investigations of Bergson and Deleuze [
18,
32]. In this view, humankind, according to the interpretation of the authors, is getting further and further away from the original source of the concept and seems to lose the fundaments of its own intellectual fulfilment [
33]. In the authors’ interpretation this also means that the epicentre of the technology-centred development boom has plucked humans, originally seeing nature as their home and as equal to them, from their natural medium, i.e., the fundamental accessibility efforts as part of his original character were degraded to technical accessibility efforts. In addition, the transformations of the environment of existence, seen as technical accessibility progress, are now turbulently posing almost insurmountable obstacles to present societies.
Navigating back to the mainstream of existential philosophy, we cannot help finding Heidegger’s quite statuesque pictures of the relationship of humans and tools that are handy or at hand on the unfurling philosophical horizon of fundamental and technical accessibility [
34]. To sum it up briefly: what is handy is a tool that is created by a human hand, driven by intellectuality, and so can be taken as quasi the natural expansion of the upper limb of the creator. This is called hereinafter an organic tool. What is at hand is the opposite; it is merely a technical tool that, although being available for humans, is void in the philosophical sense of the capacity of the human spirit to enlighten existence. We are surrounded by a mass of alienated subjects which do serve our convenience in the functional sense, but are dead objects in themselves, in an ever-growing quantity, paving the ways of humankind longing for sustainability and suffering from forgetting their humanity [
7,
35].
The authors are convinced that “travel compulsion”, now filtering deep down into societies, can also be projected on the philosophical axis of being handy and being at hand. Michalkó [
36] in his book analysing the beatific nature of travel implicitly refers to the difference implied when he says that travel itself does not necessarily contain beatific elements. These appear, as elements being handy, i.e., integrant and inspiring experiences with emotional content, if travellers become committed to and capable of the acquisition of these skills and of self-fulfilment. For reasons of space, the philosophical message of happiness cannot be further analysed in this paper, but it has been referred to as a driving force of experiences and remembrance.
On these grounds, the implementation of more and more typical mass travels as a mass phenomenon degrading the discovery of existence is seen as an ordinary tool at hand, made technically accessible by a consumption generator.
It may not be an exaggeration to say that the ever-intensifying “fashion” of accessibility is exponentially increasing the number of barriers in our existential environment, acts as a sort of antimatter in the physical environment of humankind, i.e., seeing both the environment and humans who require technical accessibility as objects to be conquered and ruled.
The authors are convinced that the creation of the forecasted accessibility paradigm does contribute to a large extent to the elimination of the postmodern maxims of objectification [
37,
38] in the following way: humans, naturally social animals, do not necessarily have to see obstacles as “barriers” jeopardising their mere existence and thus hardships to be eliminated as described; these barriers can also be identified as opportunities [
39]. They are opportunities in the intellectual and physical sense of the word, as it is just the understanding of the obstacles that leads to the progress of cooperation capacity, i.e., social fabric, and individual capacities, i.e., individuality. Barriers in their philosophical interpretation are carriers of the resultants of both potentials and topicality, possibly becoming this way mementos of the emptiness character of existence, actually [
7,
22]. The philosophical school of the study of emptiness—and its founder, thinker Nagarjuna who lived in India in the 2nd century A.D.—says that things can only exist in mutual correlations. Accordingly, nothing can stand in itself; things in this sense have an empty character. Against the relativity of things stands the concretion of the things palpable by organoleptic sensation, so that the nature of the respective object should be visible in the process and should not get dissolved in a general self-being existence (c.f. Whitehead [
40]). Objects and emptiness can always be examined in relation to specific objects just experienced, only!
All this said, it is now visible why the authors are talking about the creation of a paradigm in the relationship of physical and fundamental accessibility (
Figure 1). The paradigm of fundamental accessibility just being born basically serves the following purpose: humans as a creature with existential disabilities should see themselves and the communities created by them, and not last the technological civilisation that they created, as conditions allowing the development of Homo sapiens [
41].
Fundamental accessibility in this interpretation framework is an outstandingly important idea of the cornucopia of intellectual discoveries. Furthermore, it can be panacea, an “antidote” for the forgetting of humankind, more and more evident nowadays [
6], as it explicitly warns us about the importance of the necessity to keep our spirit fresh, i.e., it makes us realise the never-ending nature of the birth and mapping of obstacles. This activity has become by now, in the words of Feyerabend, the “toy” of humans acting like religious sects moving in ever-narrowing academic circles [
9]. Technical accessibility thus, in the opinion of the authors, is a self-standing paradigm, as, e.g., the creation and operation of an induction loop born by technological and scientific specialisation go beyond the range of the everyday skills of common individuals. This would not be a problem in itself, if it remained a handy tool, i.e., if its use were naturally available for humans who require it and if people who do not need it took it self-evident that a lot of people do need it not because of speciality but due to the diversity immanent in human nature [
42].
As it is clear, the authors have still not become adversaries of the tools offered by technological development, what they are doing here is to outline, along Marx’s and Heidegger’s paradigms of alienation, the—by far not complete—network of possible positive social and personal breakout points. The terminologies and practices of technical accessibility used in the world of travel reinforce the statements that travel itself, as a capitalist product of the barrier-dismantling technology, intends to create in the first place the possibilities of virtual experiences—not to be confused with the ever wider penetration of VR technologies, also in tourism—through the transformations of the environment for the sake of profit maximisation; however, in the majority of cases the experiences of those involved, and their relatives and assistants are the least enriched by getting to know the respective culture, it is more typical that travel becomes a survival tour. Of course, there are positive examples for really accessible travel experiences, which will be mentioned in the part of the paper demonstrating the empirical research. However, already in the discussion of the philosophical approach, it must be clarified that the latter are rather exceptions to the rule, created by the cohesive encounter of accidents and individual intentions.
Returning to the relationship between the paradigms that the paper is meant to demonstrate, it must be remarked that the relationships between both technical accessibility and fundamental accessibility, and between existential disability and the philosophy of symbiotic man reaches beyond inevitable rivalry and fight for dominance by Kuhn’s paradigms. The authors of this paper argue, both as thinkers and researchers, for the creative power of communication among paradigms.
Technical accessibility and fundamental accessibility, knowing the hermeneutical and empirical scrutinies, could never be separated from each other perfectly, just like neither of these two human activities are the creations of modern humans. Hegel says [
28] that humans can reach the state of “improvement” into an intellectual being, but for this—add the authors—it is also necessary, among other things, that they re-possesses the ability of existential remembrance [
7].
The limits of the volume of this paper, unfortunately, do not allow authors to give an in-depth discussion of the philosophical branches of existential remembrance, as self-limitation, the brief comparison to Bergson’s remembrance and intuition [
18], can be done. The coupling of remembrance and forgetting in the case of Bergson demonstrates, among other things, what humankind as a self-creating being can rely on during its special walk of life, and what the experiences from past and present by the conscious “forgetting” of which humans can ease their everyday life are [
18]. Starting from this, it seems to be justified to introduce the concept of existential remembrance, which also means the use of conscious and structured “memory vision”. In other words, humans are capable of the storage of “memory essences” filtered down from their own life experiences, and by elevating them into the present in certain situations they can re-actualise their experiential ranges. This way remembrance becomes (can become) a process-like ability of an empty nature, and thus can be used as a kind of “entrance gate” to fundamental accessibility. During our everyday lives, remembrance has been reduced to hardly more than a mechanic state, the travel contexts of which is demonstrated by the extreme volume of digital photographs and video recordings uploaded to cyberspace [
43].
Bergson, with a vision of this, does argue for the organic and man-building nature of remembrance, and implements this in his essays on intuition as a legitimate method for getting to know existence and the world [
32]. French thinker Deleuze acknowledges the viability of empirical, quasi-logical learning modes, but is also an advocate of the efficiency of intuitive learning; in fact, he says that this is not hierarchically subordinate to the research methodology structure mentioned above and is still considered as the ultimate structure. Deleuze, interestingly, uses as an example just the world of travel when he tries to demonstrate the difference between the two approaches. He argues that one can get to know a city by the photographs and paintings of it, or by the report of another man about it, but this is not a complete picture by far, and even less so it is a mental image that becomes and integral part of humanity, from which images the remembrance essences mentioned above are born. The (more) complete knowledge by Deleuze can be realised by actually arriving at the city and devoting as much time as one can to get to know it. It must be remarked that the “flock” of human hordes running across the destinations is just against the real acquisition of information and knowledge. Deleuze prescribes a detailed and thorough “field trip” for travellers so that the remembrance essences mentioned several times so far can get into their conscience.
It is hoped that this brief Bergsonian philosophical guided tour in the world of the acquisition of knowledge makes the reader feel that intuition is not an esoteric, unscientific mystery, on the one hand, and gives a contoured shape, on the other hand, to the plausible conditions in whose centre we find the paradigm of fundamental and technical accessibility, and will also make more comprehensible why these two ideas are inseparable from the general concept of existential disability [
2,
30]. Intuition in the view of the authors is thus a sort of development and usage of remembrance and abilities, which is not void of the high requirements of empirical examinations but at the same time goes beyond their rigid and often still positivist boundaries, i.e., gives space to “creative development” [
18] that must always be characteristic of the human mind. It must be remembered that we humans are not finite creatures [
16,
44,
45], ergo we, as existentially handicapped entities, must force ourselves to actually enlarge our knowledge.
Evoking Nietzsche’s world-view [
46], it can also be said that the seemingly paradoxical image of the Overman (
Übermensch) can be associated with the recognition of this infiniteness, as it can be also negatively paralleled to the self-deception that we are the “crowns of creation”. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, returning to the main square of the town, sees that people are staring at a stretched rope where the rope walker is expected to appear sooner or later. This tightrope walking metaphor can also be interpreted as follows: humankind can get, balancing on a very fine line, from being an animal to becoming human, and then the Overman [
47]. The concept of Overman in the authors’ interpretation means that one “possesses” the ability to draw the maps to all those abilities, and also to have the way of remembrance of these, which helps to orientate in the disability labyrinth also deriving from one’s infinite character. Paradoxically, the possible goal of the journey is not getting out from the labyrinth at all; the attention is drawn, instead, to the irreplaceability of recognition as a never-ending process and task.
The obstacle(s) before the individual and the groups made of individuals can also be interpreted as constituents and at the same time conditions of the existential labyrinth of being. Accordingly, technical accessibility can also be seen—provided that is still interpreted in the mainstream present way—as violating existence, i.e., the creator of an alienated, obsolete and spiritless technical world.
The attitude of technical accessibility may start to transform, by the inspiring nature of the human spirit, this anti-humane structure of existence, in which, e.g., technical accessibility measures implemented in the world of travel are re-evaluated as tools assisting the generation of experiences and memories [
2].
The authors agree with Feyerabend [
9] that the dogmatic approaches still applied in the mainstream of contemporary science continue to be obstacles blocking the implementation of generating emptiness-natured paradigms that have a holistic view, are open and communicating to each other.
This makes the authors search with their limited assets for the ways among the worlds of fundamental accessibility, technical accessibility and existential disability, and, applying the knowledge and tools of the science of travel, draw attention to the enormous responsibility that they believe we have in our everyday lives and not least during our travels that have become organic parts of these lives by now [
48].
The thousands-of-years-old practical and theoretical toolbox of emptiness philosophy also underlines the usefulness of these efforts for individuals and communities as well [
22,
23].
It must be taken into consideration that fundamental accessibility and technical accessibility are entities without self-nature not only in the conceptual but also the practical sense. This means that neither of them can exist and can “function” without the other one. Furthermore, several other conditions and casual criteria are necessary and must temporarily exist, like for example for the design, construction and operation of a single elevator, that one does not even think about—just like taking a loaf of bread off the shelf of the shop does not appear to us an emptiness-centred action with technical accessibility character.
It should also be considered that humans use emptiness of the space to build residential buildings (accommodations), in which to live life relatively comfortably, protecting, among other things, their own fragile bodies [
49,
50]—in other words, it creates technical accessibility.
The two banally simple examples above demonstrate again how conventional and witless the lives of people living in the Western hemisphere have become [
33]. They identify emptiness with nothing, which is a nihilist, anti-humane viewpoint whose origin is the lack of knowledge [
14,
51]. The same is true, in the view of the authors, for the correlations between the necessity and the implementation of technical accessibility.
The authors are convinced that an accommodation made accessible by very sophisticated technical solutions—which are very rare, unfortunately, as it will be indicated in detail in the part of the paper demonstrating the findings of the empirical research—is not enough in itself to generate either attraction [
36] or the source of experience-essence in the philosophical and everyday meaning of the word. They are also aware of the fact that the application of the fundamental accessibility paradigm, recommended for the solution of this dilemma, only sounds to have conceptual significance at first hearing; however, if the medial approach to the emptiness character is implemented as a link between fundamental and technical accessibility, it is clear how these two basic constituents of existence, inseparable of humanity, turn from a conceptual potential into a topical one.
This is why the authors are aware of the fact that the creation of the new, anthropology-oriented philosophy paradigm of man, i.e., the mapping and recognition of the character of humans as naturally barrier-dismantling and existentially disabled beings, is inseparable from fundamental accessibility.
The lack of space does not allow the detailed discussion of this issue; what must be briefly remarked here is that the intelligent state of humanity is actually an artificial state [
52] that can be described as the result of the necessity for technical accessibility originating from the needs of survival.
As Jaspers [
44] remarked, humans can be seen as creatures disabled compared to animals, taking into consideration their physical weaknesses and limitations. Humans, however, have become able to recognise their own weaknesses and in order to compensate these, to find extremely diverse, and originally not alien from nature, ways to utilise the potentials of individual and community fulfilment [
14,
46,
53].
This intellectual capacity and maturity for technical accessibility are manifested now in most cases in the—mostly capital-oriented—implementation of technical accessibility investments, which may be evaluated as one of the palpable proofs of existential disability.
Humans, as creatures depending (among other things) on the existence of fundamental accessibility, i.e., an originally disabled creature, are able to re-activate their forgotten intellectual capacities and provide an intellectual toolbox for the implementation of technical accessibility, then coming from this continuous “insemination”, to become a real traveller again in the infinite and multi-dimensional spaces of being. Humans can “extract” from here, from among the billions of experiences necessary for existential remembrance.
A Special Theoretical Approach That Ushers Us to Clearly Methodological Statements
The authors of the paper participated, as researchers and experts, in the Erasmus+ supported project called PeerAct (
www.http://peeract.eu/, accessed on 14 January 2022). This is a one-off, extraordinary research where people with disabilities were directly interviewed with a questionnaire. A disability is considered as an existential and travel condition. Unlike most other research, this was designed to get direct information from those involved and the people assisting them. It was not a large-scale sample that the authors intended to use; their goal was to make an analysis that focuses on the relation of people with disabilities to the disabilities of others and of their own. Most of the assisting persons are also disabled, making the topic and the size of the sample to be reached very special (and limited): assistants of those who need assistance. The project had been designed, implemented and got accepted just for this purpose: the demonstration of a very narrow segment. This is where the empirical part of the paper is connected to philosophy: the dimension of fundamental and technical accessibility is discussed not only with regards to travel but also to general human actions. Humans in existence are seen as implicit and explicit travellers and this manifestation of travelling can be seen through the empirical part of the paper; also, the goal was to demonstrate travel in existence as a human activity both explicitly and implicitly, and to highlight the possibilities offered by human cooperative ability in this internal and external activity. So the objective was not an extended survey (like it was not the goal of the original call for tender for the empirical research, either) but the demonstration of the societal use of the survey and the sampling of a special segment of the target group, and, on this ground, the limited but we think the correct empirical foundation of our philosophical, paradigm-shifting and -creating intentions.
This is about the travel habits and especially motivations of a narrow segment. The aim was the survey of practice and not the national level monitoring of travel habits. The authors did not want results or replies that were identifiable, and the sample was relatively small (in the call for tender, the societal use was the focus, and not the quantity of respondents or the volume of the survey) which did not allow a detailed demographical analysis. Furthermore, the call for tenders explicitly stated that sampling had to fully obey the regulations specified in GDPR. Consequently, it is not possible to expand this dimension of the research, although we think it will be useful in the future to conduct a large-sample sociological survey for the detailed introduction of this special segment, especially as regards their travel habits. It is about speciality in the sense that the specific travel offer is actually seen as segregation by the target group, and this is exactly what they fight against. This also proves that narrow technical-minded accessibility does not serve the interests of those concerned and their companions if it is not in line with the spirit of fundamental accessibility which in itself is directly against segregation.
2.2. Preliminaries and Foci of the International Empirical Research
This special survey method also justifies the joint demonstration of the three-dimensional philosophical approach mentioned above together with the findings of the special empirical research with its one-off approach and methodology, mutually reinforcing each other. An important mission of the project was to build the methodology and training material of peer assistance (which must be given absolute priority in the technical accessibility minded development of tourism services as well), to be worked out as a deliverable project, on real demands from information provided by the stakeholders, so an important part of the project was a questionnaire survey conducted among people with disabilities. The survey was meant to collect information allowing researchers to draw conclusions in three main areas:
Travel habits, consumption habits of people with disabilities during their journeys;
Opinion of people with disabilities about the situation of fundamental accessibility in tourism;
The impact of touristic activity on the quality of life of subjective feeling of happiness of the target group, and implicitly the role of these in the totality of experience gaining, living and remembrance.
The research was extended, in addition to Hungary, to the questioning and direct inclusion of travellers with disabilities from four other countries with significant positions in European tourism (Germany, Croatia, Spain and Italy), making a contribution to getting to know the coherent existence of technical and fundamental accessibility, and the travel preferences and problems of this special segment, more sensitive than the average. It was also a goal to better know the potential deviations from the travel habits of people without disabilities and to detect ways to solve the problems that this special target group encounters during their travels.
With the inclusion of the stakeholders, in a project meeting, the managers, coordinators and professional leaders of the project, and the representatives of the governing body jointly defined the indicators to be used in the research, with contribution from assistant experts very well knowing the social layer of those living with disabilities.
We are not in an easy situation when trying to define the concept of disability, as it has many different forms. Not only people with locomotory problems, or with sight and hearing impairment [
54], people with intellectual disabilities can be listed here but so can those who suffer from diseases with long-term impacts on their quality of life, e.g., from allergies [
3,
39]. According to WHO estimates, every 6th dweller of the planet suffers from some kind of disability and this number is continuously increasing [
55]. The Convention of the Right of Persons with Disabilities, approved by the United Nations Organisation in 2006 and also integrated into the Hungarian legal system, obliges the signatory countries to provide access for people with disabilities to sport, holiday and tourism resorts and services [Act No. XCII of 2007 in Hungary]. Any of us can become functionally disabled at any time—which, unlike the existential disability briefly discussed in the philosophy section of the paper, in which we are all equal, here means the mainstream, accepted disability categories [
7]; just think of the progress of our age (but an accident can also make anyone permanently disabled at any time). A special phenomenon underlining the importance of the issue from this respect is the aging of societies. Special needs in old age can emerge in practically anyone, and several other situations in life can lead to the emergence of special demands, like recovery after an accident or the special needs of families with small children [
56].
Tourism, having become a general social phenomenon, is now an important factor in affecting the quality of life [
57]. It seems to be widely accepted by now, luckily, that alleviating the travels of people with disabilities, to provide the physical conditions for this is not only an ethical, moral and also legal obligation—these conditions of a non-technical character imply the need for the adoption of the view of fundamental accessibility, but tourism of the people with disabilities is also an important economic issue [
58]. For the time being, it is a largely underutilised market segment in tourism, although positive counter-examples can also be seen in recent years [
59]. This underutilised market segment, however, should not be seen as a homogeneous group, as members of this group have diverse demands against the services, depending on the type and severity of their disabilities. There are obstacles relevant for all travellers and ones that are insurmountable problems for narrower segments, only [
2]
. Different destinations are on different levels of the implementation of fundamental accessibility: some have worked out special offers for people with disabilities; others even feature the availability of accessible environment as an added value—recognising the fundamental significance of accessibility, in addition to the market opportunities. It must be remarked that the research findings underline the hypotheses that an accessibility-centred attitude is very rare in the structural supply of destinations. What is more, there are still destinations where this issue is not given any attention at all.
The dominant European countries of international tourism, however, do place a significant emphasis on this problem; the efforts of, e.g., Spain [
60], Italy [
61] and the United Kingdom [
62] in technical accessibility in tourism are noteworthy. The personal experience of the authors is that the situation in this respect is considerably better in Germany than in Hungary: in Germany, in all fields of life (including public transportation, a sector of special significance for tourism), correct solutions can be seen for technical accessibility and thereby the provision of equal access. The implementation of complex tourism services designed and operated according to the principle of fundamental accessibility is not equal to physical accessibility; a real and not special (existential) experience given by the destination is much more than that—it is the implementation of the following principles also in tourism, without aiming at realisation of the principles of independence, equality and human dignity. Experiencing the spirit of the locality is just as important for a person living with a disability as it is for anyone else. It is a generally accepted fact that the experience of travel and holidays strengthens the subjective feeling of happiness [
36,
63]. This statement is especially true for those living with disabilities. Several empirical studies have proved in Hungary that people with disabilities encounter serious difficulties during travel; their disability is a handicap in the implementation of their travels. This makes many of them choose the option with the constraint of “non-travel” [
2,
64,
65]. Approximately half of the persons with locomotory disabilities are blocked by their handicap in participating in some touristic activity, whereas the same proportion for those with sight impairment is 75% [
4]. Serving guests with disabilities requires a high level of empathy and attention from the service providers and other actors in the tourism industry.