The Arc is proud to announce a partnership with accessibleGO, the first full-service travel platform for people with disabilities. Customers can book hotels, flights, rental cars with hand controls, wheelchair vans, accessible rides, and mobility rentals all in one place on accessibleGO. Create a free account here.

accessibleGO is the first-ever hotel booking service built exclusively for people with accessible needs.

Learn about the history of accessibleGo:

AccessibleGO was inspired by Emma Eljas, the mother of accessibleGO cofounder Miriam Eljas Goldman. Emma was a longtime wheelchair user with multiple sclerosis, who split her time between serving as commissioner on the Valley Transportation Authority Disability Advisory Commission in her hometown of Silicon Valley, working to improve accessibility for regional transportation, and using a wheelchair-lift van to explore the sights and sounds of her local Bay Area region.

Through Emma’s eyes, Miriam witnessed the numerous challenges faced by people with accessible needs when they traveled. No amount of careful planning seemed to help. Even calling ahead could simply mean being misinformed by a well-intentioned employee and arriving to find that a hotel bed was completely unusable with a wheelchair.

There was plenty about traveling with accessible needs that could get a person down. But, inspired by her mother’s can-do attitude and her lifelong work for the accessible needs community, Miriam felt like there was something more she could do.

On travel websites, it was standard for people to post reviews about a hotel’s various amenities (check-in, how comfortable the beds are, food quality, etc.), but these reviews did not usually include any details about accessibility-related features. Miriam thought there could be a space where travelers with accessibility needs could share important details and real-time information with each other about accessibility features and verify the accuracy and utility of those features, so that travelers could be confident they were going to be safe and comfortable on their journeys. The way Miriam saw it, this simple information, shared within the community, could completely change the game for travel with accessibility-needs.

The vision of accessibleGO is to create a platform for travelers with disabilities to access information, share experiences, and be inspired to travel the world.