What Does It Actually Mean to Create a ‘Sensory Inclusive’ City?

18.05.2024 - 14:29 / cntraveler.com

This Future of Travel column is a recurring series written by JD Shadel exploring the innovations and bold ideas changing—and challenging—travel.

The anxiety-inducing lines and harsh fluorescent lights at airports; the noisy crowds at popular tourist attractions; and the booming audiovisual spectacle of an arena event. These are only a few of the everyday experiences that tend to be overwhelming to many travelers. But for some travelers with sensory needs, it can feel like someone’s taken a remote control and turned everything up to full blast.

Sensory processing challenges—when the brain has difficulty receiving and responding to information that comes in through the senses such as sound, touch, taste, sight, and smell—can affect a wide range of individuals, including people with autism, those with ADHD and anxiety, veterans with PTSD, adults with dementia or Parkinson’s disease, and stroke patients. “Sensory needs” is a really broad umbrella term because, some argue, it has to be. It shows just how many people deal with sensory needs when they travel, says Uma Srivastava, the executive director of KultureCity, the non-profit behind the Sensory Inclusion Certification increasingly seen at travel destinations across the country.

“One in four of us have some kind of sensory need,” Srivastava estimates, repeating a common talking point drawn from US Census Bureau data on disabilities. Of course, it’s not so simple: Landing on a precise percentage of the global traveling public experiencing invisible disabilities like these isn’t an exact science, as working definitions for what constitutes a “sensory need”—and even “invisible disability”—vary from source to source. (The CDC, for example, uses a broader “one in four adults in the United States have some type of disability” stat.) But the point stands: Sensory needs affect millions of people.

In some cases, sensory needs speak to challenges that just come with travel. “The barriers are sometimes just inherent to the traveling experience, like long lines in airports or being at a crowded tourist site,” says Zoe Gross, director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN), a leading nonprofit advocacy organization run by and for individuals on the autism spectrum. “Those are barriers that [are] very difficult to remediate, but are some of the real things standing in the way between autistic people and a successful travel experience.”

Other barriers directly stem from a lack of awareness and systemic ableism. Cynthia Andrew shares stories on her Instagram account @SimplyCyn about the experiences of traveling with her twin three-year-old sons, who received autistic diagnoses more than a year ago. “It’s hard enough for families with neurotypical