Accessibility requirements for Travel & Hospitality websites

Regulations that apply

Travel & Hospitality sits at the intersection of general digital-accessibility law and sector-specific obligations. The most relevant items to track:

• EAA — transport ticketing

  Online ticketing for air, rail, sea, urban transport.

  EU

• DOT Air Carrier Access Act rules

  Specific accessibility requirements for airline websites.

  US

The accessibility risks specific to Travel & Hospitality

Every industry has its own failure pattern. The combination below is what audits, complaints, and lawsuits in this sector keep returning to. Fixing them clears the most-cited issues without touching every page.

• Date pickers and calendars without keyboard support

  Almost universal failure point.

  2.1.1, 4.1.2

• Passenger info forms with placeholder-only labels

  Especially "passenger 2 of 3" forms.

  3.3.2

A short remediation checklist

Most Travel & Hospitality teams do not need a 200-item audit before they fix anything. They need an ordered list of the highest-impact moves. Start with these and re-audit after each pass.

• Audit search, results, and full booking flow

• Test calendars with screen reader and keyboard

Scoping an audit for Travel & Hospitality

Travel & Hospitality carries 2 distinct obligations to satisfy — EAA — transport ticketing, DOT Air Carrier Access Act rules — spanning EU and US. An auditor prices the work by how many of those regimes are in scope and how many distinct task flows carry them, not by page count.

The 2 failure patterns above map to 2.1.1, 4.1.2, 3.3.2. Every one of those is machine-detectable, which means a scan can clear them before an auditor starts charging by the hour. What remains for manual review is the judgement work: whether date pickers and calendars without keyboard support actually functions end to end for a screen-reader user.

• Scan first, audit second

  Clearing the 2 automated patterns above shortens the manual pass to the flows that need a person.

• Scope by template, not by page

  A site with thousands of pages usually has fewer than twenty distinct templates. Price the templates.

• Re-test after remediation

  The conformance claim rests on the re-test, not the first report.

• Evidence for EU

  Keep dated scan history — it is what turns a conformance claim into something a regulator accepts.