– Tourism for All

EIDD Annual Conference, 
Milan Triennale, 28-29 June 2007

The Milan Charter

The participants in the International Conference “Tourism for All”, held in the Milan Triennale on 28-29 June 2007,

• Adopting the broad definition of tourism coined by the United Nations World Tourism Organisation as: 

”the activities of persons travelling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for leisure, business and other purposes not related to the exercise of an activity remunerated from within the place visited”;
• Firm in the belief that everyone has an inalienable right to freedom of movement and that this human right is unquestionably enriched by the opportunity to experience other ways of life, with their respective social, cultural and economic conditions and traditions;
• Acutely aware that travel and tourism constitute one of the main sources of Gross Domestic Product and a major source of employment, income and thus economic prosperity and social solidity in many countries: “more accessibility creates sustainable turnover and improves service quality for all”;
• Secure in the knowledge that a sustainable tourism industry can only be achieved by ensuring that human diversity, requiring seamless inclusiveness, is recognised as a fundamental parameter in the processes of marketing target analysis, system and service design and human resource training;
• Welcoming the encouraging attitude adopted in the report of the Tourism Sustainability Group set up by the European Commission in 2004 and published in February 2007;
• Having studied several areas of specific interest to tourism:

1) Italy as a Tourist Destination – Challenges for the future;
2) Conference Tourism: Today’s boom industry;
3) Sustainability in Tourism;
4) Benchmarking in Tourism Services;
5) Design for All in Theory and Practice applied to Tourism
• Convinced of the significance of Design for All as a tool for achieving a thriving society based on human diversity, social inclusion and equality and reiterating the principles enshrined in the EIDD Stockholm Declaration©, adopted on 9 May 2004;
  1. Declare that Design for All has the potential to create  the conditions for everyone to be able to use tourism and leisure time, both actively and passively;
  2. Invite all social, economic, political and tourism organisations, both private and public, at local, regional, national, continental and international levels, to make every effort to factor the theory and practice of Design for All into strategic planning and development of products and services for tourism as a horizontal, interdisciplinary practice;
  3. Call on the European institutions and their national counterparts to create funding headings tailored to disseminating the potential of design in general and of the Design for All methodology in particular to tourism entrepreneurs and decision-makers, including developing and supporting targeted management, human resource and awareness training, with the aim of achieving a more inclusive society and economy in Europe and worldwide;
  4. Welcome the invitation from ICCA to continue partnering with the conference and convention industry in its social inclusion outreach programme and invite other organisations active in the public and private sectors to support the call expressed at the previous point and initiate comparable programmes;
  5. Undertake to assist EIDD in establishing a European Standing Conference on the Implementation of Design for All in Tourism, to meet once every four years and act as a forum for collecting best practices from the widest possible range of actors in the design and tourism communities and showcasing them to interested audiences from all over the world;
  6. Commit to publishing and disseminating this Final Act to their own communities.

This Milan Charter has been sent to:

• The European Commissioner for Enterprise
• The European Commission Tourism Sustainability Group
• The Council of Europe
• UNWTO
• ICCA
• The leaders of the political groups in the European Parliament
• National Ministers of Tourism
• European Cultural Capitals
• National tourist offices and Visiteurope.


Milan, 29 June 2007

• Milan Charter Tourism for All 2007 (PDF)