Kenya has just launched its boldest tourism campaign yet — Experience Wonder. But wonder, by definition, should be for everyone. For 1.3 billion travellers with disabilities, the infrastructure to deliver that promise is only just beginning to be built. Writes Muthuri Kinyamu, Founder, Accessible Travel Kenya; Chair, KTB Medical Tourism Product Club.
On 4th March 2026, at ITB Berlin — the world's largest travel trade show — Kenya unveiled its bold new global tourism campaign: Experience Wonder. It is a magnificent campaign.
More than a tagline, it is an invitation. To discover the Origin of Wonder. The origin of all things. A destination where nature, wildlife, culture, and human heritage converge in their most authentic form. From the birthplace of humanity to landscapes found nowhere else on earth. Come curious. Leave in awe.
But who, exactly, is this wonder for?
When one of those newly inspired travellers — a wheelchair user, a Deaf adventurer, a person recovering from surgery — tries to book the Kenya experience that campaign just sold them, what happens? Can they board the transfer vehicle? Can they hear the safari guide? Can they access the lodge?
In most cases, the honest answer is still: with great difficulty, if at all.
The Gap Between the Pitch and the Product
Kenya's tourism marketing is world-class. Our national parks are genuinely among the greatest natural spectacles on earth. Our hospitality industry is warm, experienced, and increasingly sophisticated. But for travellers with disabilities, the gap between the brochure and the actual experience remains enormous.
Wheelchair users arriving at JKIA face an immediate question: how do I get from this airport to my hotel in a vehicle I can actually board? The answer — until very recently — was: with enormous difficulty, improvisation, and no small amount of indignity.
Deaf travellers booking safaris face a different but equally fundamental barrier: a guide who cannot communicate with them, a vehicle full of whispered commentary they cannot access, and an experience that is technically present but effectively excluded.
These are not edge cases. According to the World Health Organisation, 1 in 6 people globally lives with some form of disability. That is 1.3 billion potential travellers. The global disability travel market is valued at an estimated US$58 billion — and is the fastest-growing underserved segment in the entire tourism industry.
East Africa is selling the dream. But the infrastructure to deliver it — for every traveller — is only just beginning to be built.
Watching Wonder from Nairobi — and Asking the Hard Question
Experience Wonder is exactly the bold, confident storytelling that Kenya's brand deserves.
As I watched the launch both as a Kenyan and founder of Accessible Travel Kenya, the country's first dedicated accessible travel ground handler, the question I could not stop asking was this: is the Kenya we are selling at ITB the Kenya we can actually deliver — for every traveller?
At Accessible Travel Kenya, we operate a fleet of purpose-adapted vehicles fitted with ramps, powerlifts, and swivel seats, as well as 4x4 Land Cruisers adapted for game drives — serving wheelchair users on airport transfers, city runs, and safari circuits across East Africa. We rent all-terrain wheelchairs and portable ramps to lodges and camps that lack their own. We have trained and deployed sign language safari interpreters — fluent in both Kenyan Sign Language and American Sign Language — who are also experienced wildlife guides.
We work as a white-label supplier to tour operators and DMCs: invisible to their clients, seamlessly integrated into their itineraries. When an operator receives a booking from a traveller with a disability, they no longer have to say no.
The Commercial Case Is Overwhelming
The World Health Organisation estimates that 1.3 billion people worldwide live with some form of disability. When you extend that to elderly travellers with reduced mobility and companions, accessible travel influences the decisions of more than 3 billion people globally. The European accessible travel market alone is estimated at approximately €400 billion annually. The United States accessible travel market runs at $70 to $80 billion per year. The global accessible tourism economy, when fully counted, is estimated between $800 billion and $1 trillion.
Accessible travel is not a single customer profile. It encompasses wheelchair users and seniors with reduced mobility — the segment most visible to the industry. But it also includes Deaf and low-vision travellers, neurodiverse travellers seeking autism-friendly or sensory-considerate experiences, and medical travellers — patients arriving for treatment, rehabilitation guests, and people on long-term accessible stays. Each of these sub-segments has distinct needs, distinct spending patterns, and distinct loyalty characteristics.
In a market where differentiation is increasingly difficult, accessibility is a durable competitive advantage.
Kenya is aggressively positioning itself as East Africa's leading medical tourism destination. Kenya Airways has signed MOUs with major Nairobi hospitals. The Kenya Tourism Board has established a Medical Tourism Product Club — which I chair — to coordinate the sector's development. But medical tourists, almost by definition, often arrive with mobility, sensory, or recovery needs. A medical tourism strategy without accessible ground transport is a strategy with a significant hole in it.
Accessible tourism is not a niche. It is the future of inclusive travel — and Kenya has the chance to own it in Africa.
What Kenya Is Already Getting Right
We already have some of the basics right.
Kenya Wildlife Service now offers free park entry for persons with disabilities. That is not a small gesture — it is a signal from one of Kenya's most powerful tourism institutions that PWDs are welcome in our national parks. Kenya Airways offers discounted airfares for PWDs, reducing one of the most significant cost barriers to travel.
The Transport Regulatory Authority has developed Transport Service Vehicle standards for inclusive transport — a meaningful step towards making accessible vehicles the norm, not the exception. Kenya has a new Disability Act, which is still in the implementation phase.
These are real, concrete steps. They deserve to be celebrated — and built upon.
The Data We Are Missing — and Why It Matters
We cannot fully develop accessible tourism without understanding the market it is building for. Right now, we are largely operating blind. There are several questions I would like to put directly to our national institutions:
Can the Tourism Regulatory Authority conduct a census of accessible and adapted accommodation rooms across Kenya's hotels, lodges, and tented camps? We need to know what exists, where, at what standard, and at what price point. It is already mandated by law that for every 25 rooms in a hotel, 1 room has to be disability friendly.
The Tourism Research Institute can begin tracking tourist flow and occupancy specifically by persons with disabilities. We cannot make the business case to investors, operators, and government without data. The moment we can show that accessible tourism guests stay longer, spend more, and return more often — which international evidence strongly suggests — this market becomes impossible to ignore.
To the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics: what is the economic contribution of persons with disabilities to Kenya's economy? Their spending power, their employment, their consumption — this data does not currently exist in any accessible form. Without it, PWDs remain invisible in the national economic conversation and are statistics of a charity case.
To the Kenya Tourism Board: Kenya is already one of the world's great tourism destinations. It could also become Africa's leading accessible tourism destination. That is a brand position worth owning. I would ask KTB to begin actively promoting Kenya's accessible tourism offering — our parks, our adapted vehicles, our sign language guides — to the international disability travel market. The audience is 1.3 billion people. They are looking for a destination that wants them.
We cannot build what we cannot measure. Kenya needs accessible tourism data — and it needs it now.
The Policy Gaps That Are Holding Us Back
For all the progress, there are specific policy failures that are actively preventing investment in accessible tourism infrastructure — and they need to be named clearly. The contrast between what the Persons with Disabilities Act provides and what it omits tells the whole story.
Kenya's Persons with Disabilities Act — and its 2025 amendments — contains genuinely strong provisions. PWDs are fully exempt from income tax on employment earnings. Employers who hire PWDs receive a 25% deduction on salaries and wages paid to those employees, and a 50% deduction on the direct costs of workplace modifications, assistive devices, and adaptive technology. Duty, VAT, and government levies are waived on vehicles, health materials, and assistive equipment imported for personal use by PWDs. Local manufacturers of assistive devices can access additional incentives through the Cabinet Secretary for Finance. These are not token gestures — they represent a serious legislative commitment to inclusion.
But read the Act carefully, and a striking gap emerges: there is no equivalent incentive for an able-bodied investor who wants to build an accessible tourism business. An entrepreneur who wants to purchase a fleet of wheelchair accessible vehicles, fit out accessible lodge rooms, or set up an inclusive ground handler receives no preferential treatment whatsoever from KRA. Compare this to the incentives available to investors in renewable energy, affordable housing, or export manufacturing — sectors the government has deliberately chosen to stimulate. Accessible tourism, which serves a marginalised population, generates foreign exchange, and addresses a documented market failure, is not on that list.
The second gap is more specific — and more immediately absurd. The Act permits PWDs to import vehicles duty-free, a well-intentioned provision designed to improve their personal mobility and independence. But those duty-exempt vehicles cannot legally be used for commercial purposes. A PWD who imports an accessible van cannot operate it as a transport business. They cannot deploy their own exemption to generate income, create employment, or serve other PWDs as fare-paying passengers.
The result is a policy that provides a personal asset while simultaneously blocking the entrepreneurial pathway that could turn that asset into a livelihood, a service, and a tax-generating business. The Act gives with one hand and constrains with the other — not out of malice, but because the commercial use case was never considered when the provision was drafted.
The Act protects PWDs. What it does not yet do is unlock the investment that would serve them at scale.
How Do We Unlock This Opportunity?
The solutions are not complicated. They require political will, legislative amendments, and a single inter-agency working group. Here is what I think should happen.
KRA should introduce investment incentives for accessible tourism infrastructure — specifically: import duty waivers on purpose-adapted vehicles purchased by licensed accessible tourism operators; VAT relief on accessibility modifications to accommodation and transport; and accelerated depreciation on assistive devices and adaptive equipment used in commercial tourism operations. The Act already has the architecture. The gap is its extension to investors, not just direct beneficiaries.
The prohibition on the commercial use of duty-exempt vehicles imported by PWDs should be amended. A licensing and regulatory framework — managed through TRA and NTSA — could govern commercial use while preventing abuse of the exemption. This single legislative change would immediately unlock a pipeline of PWD-led accessible transport businesses, create skilled employment, and generate VAT and corporate tax revenue that more than offsets the duty foregone.
KTB, TRA, TRI, KAA, KQ, KWS, Tourism Fund and KNBS should establish a dedicated accessible tourism working group — with a mandate to collect the data, set the accommodation standards, and build the marketing strategy that this sector currently lacks. These are not separate problems. They are one problem, and they need one coordinated response.
And the private sector — tour operators, DMCs, hotels, hospitals — should stop waiting for government to move first. The regulation will follow the market. The market will follow the operators who move first.
The Safari Should Be For Everyone
Kenya's new campaign says: come curious, leave in awe. That is the right ambition. Now let us build the Kenya that delivers on it — for every traveller, regardless of how they move through the world.
Experience Wonder should mean exactly that. All of it. For all of us.
