Understanding the Discrimination Experienced by Customers with Disabilities in the Tourism and Hospitality Industry: The Case of Seoul in South Korea
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Literature Review
2.1. Accessible Tourism and Services (Tourism for All)
2.2. Discrimination Against Persons with Disabilities
3. Methodology
3.1. Ethnographic Approach
- How is the individual treated discriminatingly in the hospitality and tourism industry?
- What are the reasons and processes for the situation, and who is involved in the situation?
- What do individuals feel and think about the situation?
- How would a tourism study interpret the revealed experiences of the individuals’ discrimination?
3.2. Study Participants and Ethics
3.3. Data Collection and Analysis
4. Findings
4.1. Discrimination by Physical Facilities
“Customers with nondisabilities may think of wheelchairs as a personal convenience, but the customers with disabilities think wheelchairs are their legs. It’s part of my body. The absence of a cell phone charger or a camera charger in a tourist destination is an inconvenience that applies equally to everyone. But if there’s a bench where you can rest when your legs are overloaded, and there’s no electric wheelchair charger, I’m being discriminated against.”
“Then you should have informed me in advance that there is no charging facility. You told people who walk on their feet to wear comfortable shoes because they have to walk a long distance. Don’t you think you should tell me to get a hand-operated wheelchair since I’m going a long way to get rid of the electric wheelchair battery?”
4.2. Discrimination by Human Resource and Service Regulations
“A kind employee once put the glass down on the table and asked if he would feed me with it. Then I just asked for a straw. Of course, I need more help than a person with free arms. But the help that makes me drink are different form the help that makes me drink myself.”
“When I couldn’t cross the threshold with a wheelchair, the front door staff suddenly came back and pushed my wheelchair away. And smiled kindly and courteous. But I couldn’t smile or thank him. The feeling I felt at that time was really ridiculous and unfair. It was the fault of the hotel that there was a threshold. The hotel that made me inaccessible should apologize, but what did the employee mean by kindness? It’s what helped me not to get over it. Very kindly! There is a real wide gap between his and mine.”
“I don’t eat out at all except for a few regular restaurants, because I feel bad when I go into a restaurant, the employees whisper among themselves. Maybe it’s a kind of information sharing that they need to pay attention to me, but I feel humiliated to talk about me in my hearing. I don’t see it, but it’s not that I don’t hear it.”
4.3. Discrimination by Other Customers
“I think there is a difference between having physical facilities and not having them. Low-floor buses give passengers the assumption that people who use them often don’t use wheelchairs, but there may be people who use them. Unconsciously, there is a natural atmosphere among the passengers. On the other hand, buses that do not have wheelchair boarding facilities are considered to be causing inconvenience to many others as they challenge the impossible with the individual greed of customer with disability. This creates the justification for discrimination. In the first place, I would be a passenger who was less qualified than a person with nondisability. If they have to get changeable their service because of me, there would be an invisible wall between the other passengers and me.”
“I can’t hear, but I can recognize what the other person is saying by looking at their mouth. But because it’s sometimes not accurate, and I don’t hear sounds coming from places I can’t see, my husband takes care of me in sign language. However, people I meet while our traveling always praise my husband as a good partner of me. It’s a compliment for being married me and traveling with me even though I’m deaf, and it’s a really rude compliment to me. It’s true that my disability makes me uncomfortable together, but objectively, I live with more bad conditions for my husband. The people I met on the trip don’t praise or pretend to know such a marital situation.”
5. Discussion
6. Conclusions
Funding
Conflicts of Interest
References
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ID | Age | Gender | Condition of the Disability |
---|---|---|---|
Participant 1 | 30s | M | Difficulty accessing visual information |
Participant 2 | 50s | M | Difficulty accessing visual information |
Participant 3 | 40s | F | Difficulty accessing auditory information |
Participant 4 | 40s | M | Difficulty accessing auditory information |
Participant 5 | 50s | M | Using a wheelchair |
Participant 6 | 30s | F | Using a wheelchair |
Participant 7 | 30s | F | Using a wheelchair |
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Lim, J.-E. Understanding the Discrimination Experienced by Customers with Disabilities in the Tourism and Hospitality Industry: The Case of Seoul in South Korea. Sustainability 2020, 12, 7328. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12187328
Lim J-E. Understanding the Discrimination Experienced by Customers with Disabilities in the Tourism and Hospitality Industry: The Case of Seoul in South Korea. Sustainability. 2020; 12(18):7328. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12187328
Chicago/Turabian StyleLim, Jee-Eun. 2020. "Understanding the Discrimination Experienced by Customers with Disabilities in the Tourism and Hospitality Industry: The Case of Seoul in South Korea" Sustainability 12, no. 18: 7328. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12187328
APA StyleLim, J. -E. (2020). Understanding the Discrimination Experienced by Customers with Disabilities in the Tourism and Hospitality Industry: The Case of Seoul in South Korea. Sustainability, 12(18), 7328. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12187328