London Gatwick Website First to Meet Disability Travel Gold Standard
- Written by Roberto Castiglioni
User friendly, perfectly laid out, featuring all necessary information disabled passengers need to prepare a hassle-free trip; London Gatwick website is the first U.K. airport website to meet the disability travel Gold Standard in full.
Reduced Mobility Rights is currently reviewing the websites of all U.K. airports. The London Gatwick website is the first to meet the disability travel gold standard in full.
Reduced Mobility Rights created the Airport Website Gold Standard with the purpose of helping airport managing companies to create web pages dedicated to disabled passengers services in a user-friendly, comprehensive, and thorough manner. The goal is to ensure that all U.K. airport websites will meet these standards as soon as possible, to ensure people with reduced mobility can collect all necessary information ahead of traveling to the airport.
As we have seen with previous assessments, there are no universal standards at this time. We go from extremely good (Belfast airport) to good with room for improvement (London Heathrow) to fail (Bristol Airport). These assessments are being taken in due consideration by airport managing companies.
“I promise we will introduce changes to make our special assistance page more user friendly,” Mark Hicks, PRM manager and member of the BAA Heathrow PRM Charges Governance Group, told Reduced Mobility Rights last Monday.
"Thank you for your feedback on the Bristol Airport web site. Our web site team will be taking a look through the comments and suggestions made in your review and rest assured we will be working to ensure the information provided meets the needs of passengers with reduced mobility," James Gore, Head of Communications, Bristol Airport told reduced Mobility Rights after reading their review.
London Gatwick is the first airport website to meet all criteria and guidelines of the Disability Travel Gold Standard, making it the best example for those airport managing companies in need of enhancing their pages.
We reviewed the "Special Assistance" page of London Gatwick website using the following criteria: accessibility from the website home page, quality of immediately available content, quality of downloadable content, quality of contact information within the "Special Assistance" page. Below is a link to the page. This evaluation dates 20 September 2011.
London Gatwick (opens a new window)
Accessibility from the airport's website home page:
Excellent: Easily accessible via the main navigation menu. First box in the content area of the page and well thought of sub-menu navigation in the navigation menu to the left of the page.
Quality of immediately available content:
Excellent: The home page of the Special Assistance website directory is a masterpiece. Easy to read, with all essential information on hand or easily accessible via the intuitive sub menu in the left navigation bar.
Quality of downloadable content:
Excellent: London Gatwick provides users downloadable maps of support points within both terminal buildings. It also provides an exhaustive PRM service level agreement which contains the airport quality standards.
Quality of contact information within the "Special Assistance" page:
Excellent: all vital contact information is available on every page of the Special Assistance website directory.
During the evaluation, we could not avoid to note that this page is made with the end user in mind. Every aspect of it is made to ensure passengers with disabilities can easily access the information they need. It is refreshing to view the perfectly structured website of London Gatwick after dealing with the failures of the Bristol airport website. Reduced Mobility Rights hopes that those airport websites in need of overhaul take action on their earliest convenience to ensure compliance with EU regulation 1107/2006 and. Most importantly, to ensure people with reduced mobility can enjoy the same hassle-free travel experience all other passengers experience.
