This chapter presents the findings of a study into the economic contribution of tourists with disabilities to the Australian economy. The importance of including economic modelling within the research project is that rudimentary market estimates of tourists with disabilities in Australia were undertaken over a decade ago (Darcy, 1998). These estimates used a basic gross demand approach without having any detailed understanding of the expenditure patterns of the group. Further, while more detailed work has been undertaken in the US (HarrisInteractive Market Research, 2003, 2005) and Europe (Buhalis et al., 2005; Neumann & Reuber, 2004) these continued to use basic gross demand estimates rather than any form of sophisticated economic modelling. The framework we use for estimating the economic contribution of tourists with disabilities to Australia employs the Australian Tourism Satellite Account (TSA). First, a brief overview of the data gathered from each of the steps used in the methodology will be presented. Second, an overview of the nature and usefulness of Tourism Satellite Accounting to estimate the economic contribution of a tourism market segment will be provided. Third, the summary findings of the economic modelling are presented, including the expenditure associated with tourists with disabilities and the economic contribution to tourism through Gross Value Added, Tourism Gross Domestic Product and Direct Tourism Employment.

Market Size and Economic Contribution

Globally there are over 650 million people with disabilities, equating to about 10% of humanity (United Nations, 2009). While the World Health Organization provides a framework for collecting disability statistics, the way that nation states define disability, operationalise the definitions, the regularity in which they collect the statistics and the rigour of the existing collections have all been identified as major methodological issues to accurately determining the number of people with disabilities (Fujiura et al., 2005; Fujiura & Rutkowski-Kmitta, 2001). This has led to wide variations in estimating disability numbers particularly between the developed and the developing world.