11 Worst Countries for Disabled Travellers

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Our list of worst countries for disabled travellers will be a great guideline on traveling destinations you should avoid.

It is estimated by WHO’s World Report On Disability that 15% of the world’s population (more than a billion people) live with some form of disability. Out of this number, 110 to 190 million people live with a severe disability. Unfortunately, the number of people with disabilities is growing with each year. Among the reasons for this are the world’s aging population and the increase in chronic diseases that are directly connected with some forms of disabilities. As expected, we see a bigger number of people with disabilities in low income and developing countries than in developed countries. Some reports are also showing that in certain countries, children that belong to ethnic minorities and live in poverty have a high risk of developing a disability compared to other children.

11 Worst Countries for Disabled Travellers

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In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits any discrimination against people with disabilities in any way. Also, there are multiple other positive examples that show real intention to guarantee equal rights to disabled persons.  Unfortunately, there are numerous challenges that disabled persons face in their efforts to be treated equally. For example, there are lots of misconceptions and negative attitudes towards them that are surprisingly common in the developed countries. There are fears (mostly unfounded) that people with disabilities are not productive enough and they will not produce satisfying results as employees, students, etc. Other problems include lack of access to services like healthcare and rehabilitation. These are all challenges disabled persons face when they are in their native country, but what are the challenges when they travel abroad?

There are quite many of them, we are afraid. Traveling in an unknown territory is hard enough, but for people with disabilities, it can get much harder. This is why experts advise that you plan ahead and pay great attention to details. You can find numerous opportunities for people with disabilities to experience certain tourist attractions with the help of traveling organizations and tourist guides specialized in making trips accessible for disabled travellers. Also, many hotels and hotels offer accommodations suited for people with disability, so you just need to look around more carefully. Traveling doesn’t have to be hard if you do your part correctly. In case you rely on using credit cards, check out our list of the 11 Worst Countries for Credit Card Fraud to know where to be extra careful.

Now, you are probably wondering how we created our list of worst countries for disabled travellers. Since there is no definitive ranking, we designed a methodology that will give us a good idea. We used the Global Travel and Tourism report made by World Economic Forum that ranked 136 countries of the world based on multiple criteria connected to tourism and travel. For our list, we used the rankings for safety and security, health and hygiene, air transport infrastructure, ground and port infrastructure and tourist service infrastructure. Safety and security ranking is based on the reliability of police service, homicide rates and index of terrorism incidence among others while health and hygiene ranking is based on physicians per capita density, a number of hospital beds and other indicators like access to improved sanitations and drinking water.  The 20 worst ranked countries received points from 1 to 20 for each ranking, with points then being combined into our IM Score. Bigger score meant higher ranking on the list. The majority of information about the accessibility assistance is taken from the U.S. Department of State. Let’s now get on with the list of worst countries for disabled travellers .

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