Benidorm and Predif present the Plan that will consolidate the city as the most accessible tourist destination in Spain

The mayor of Benidorm, Toni Pérez, together with the president and the head of the Accessible Tourism department of ​​Predif (State Representative Platform of People with Physical Disabilities), Francisco Sardón and Luigi Leporiere, today have presented Benidorm Tourist Accessibility Plan, document of "dynamic" and "transversal" work that will allow the city "to consolidate itself as the most accessible sun and beach destination in Spain".

Toni Pérez explained that this Plan was born from the collaboration started in 2017 with Predif and once the entity has carried out "a detailed analysis of the entire tourist value chain and the destination" to assess "the degree of accessibility of Benidorm, which it ends with a high level of satisfaction ”.

According to the mayor, this analysis constitutes a "truthful and exact X-ray of the physical, visual, auditory and cognitive accessibility conditions of Benidorm", being "a still photo of where we are, what are our strengths and also our weaknesses". In this regard, the head of Accessible Tourism of Predif has pointed out that "Benidorm is a destination that has advanced and continues improving a lot" in this matter, so that "it is not easy to find aspects of improvement, although there are, because it has good accessibility conditions ”.

Leporiere has detailed that the development of the Tourist Accessibility Plan has been divided into three phases. In the first, "an analysis of the demand" and of "the tourist offer", both public and private, has been carried out, which has reached "the information channels", "urban environments", "the accessibility conditions of the main tourist resources ”and“ public transport ”. In a later phase, “a participatory reflection” was addressed, in which “all the aspects ” involved have taken part to “detect needs” that have been reflected in the Strategic Plan for Tourist Accessibility, whose design represents the third and final phase.

In this Strategic Plan and in the consequent Operational Plan five objectives are established: the improvement of the conditions of accessibility to the tourist offer; the management of accessibility in the tourism field with human and technical resources and also involving the private sector; awareness-raising and professionalization through sensitization to make the need for accessibility visible, including training and educational material; improving competitiveness by creating authentic universally accessible tourism products; and, finally, the promotion and improvement of positioning.

For his part, the president of Predif has highlighted "the political will that we have found in Benidorm" to comply with the Universal Accessibility Law and go further by "adapting its tourism products" to be "a top quality destination in terms of accessibility. Sardón has assured that "Benidorm is the most accessible sun and beach destination in Spain, and surely in the entire European Union", and has stressed that compliance with the objectives set out in the Tourist Accessibility Plan "benefits the whole of the population".

In line with the DTI Plan and the SDGs

As the mayor and Leporiere have explained, the Tourist Accessibility Plan is in line with the DTI Master Plan, with the Valencian Community's Strategic Tourism Plan, and with the Sustainable Development Goals (ODS). In fact, as Toni Pérez has stressed, the Plan “is linked to 8 of the 17 SDGs” and “two of them, 10 and 11 –Reduction of inequalities, and Sustainable cities and communities- are studied in a very specific way ”.