Dr Scott Rains
Biographcal Summary
srains@oco.net
Dr. Scott Rains writes daily on travel and issues in the
tourism industry of interest to people with disabilities. His work appears
online at www.RollingRains.com and http://withtv.typepad.com/weblog/travel/
. He is the founder of the global forum on Inclusive Tourism – Tour Watch.
Rains’ articles have also appeared in New Mobility, Emerging Horizons, Venture,
Brave New Traveler, Challenges, TravelBiz Monitor, Enabled Online, Contours,
Accessible Portugal, Audacity, Travel and Transitions, eTur Brazil,
Success & Ability, Turismo Polibea, [with]TV, and Disaboom among others.
For his research on the topic of Universal Design and the
travel and hospitality industry he was appointed as Resident Scholar at the
Center for Cultural Studies of the University
of California Santa Cruz (2004-05).
Rains has been retained as a consultant on Inclusive Tourism traveling as
Visiting Journalist at the invitation of India,
Australia, and South
Africa. He is a lifetime Honorary Member of
the European Network for Accessible Tourism (ENAT).
He is active as a consultant and speaker. Select
presentations include:
- Address
to the Carlo Besta Italian National Neurological Institute at Neurology in the Third
Millennium: From disability to social reinsertion conference
- Presentations
for Tourism KwaZulu Natal, Gauteng Tourism, and Cape Town Tourism during January – February 2009 consultation throughout South
Africa on Inclusive Tourism in
anticipation of 2010 FIFA World Cup
- Four
full-day workshops on the disabled traveler market for travel
professionals in India
(New Delhi, Mumbai, Kochi,
Chennai); accessibility consultations with Kerala tourist destinations;
capacity-building sessions with Indian disabled peoples’ organizations
(DPOs) (2008)
- Opening
keynote address at the second International Accessible Tourism
Conference at the United Nations in Bangkok
Thailand
(ICAT 2007)
- Pre-conference
workshop on travel and Universal Design at the Adaptive Environments Conference
in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
(2005),
- Opening
keynote address at the first International Accessible Tourism Conference
in Taipei, Taiwan
(ICAT 2005)
- Plenary
presentation at the NICAN conference on Easy Travel in Perth,
Australia (2004)
He was co-convener of the second International Accessible
Tourism Conference hosted by the United Nations November 2007 in Bangkok,
Thailand and was
consultant for the September 2007 World Assembly on the U. N. Convention, on
the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Seoul,
South Korea. He is
Resource Person for UNESCAP on the topic of inclusion in tourism.
Rains edited of the first body of research on travel and disability in
the field of Disability Studies with the publication of the 2006 (Vol. 2 Issue
2) of the Review of Disability Studies. He
has been invited to edit a follow-up volume after contributing to the Disability Studies Quarterly (March
2007). He edited a special issue of the journal
Design for All India on advances in Universal Design in Thailand. He is a regular contributor to the latter journal.
Dr. Rains is currently editing an anthology on Inclusive Tourism in Spanish and
Portuguese for the Turismo para Todos Network of the Inter-American Institute on Disability and Inclusive Development and chapters
on Inclusive Tourism and Universal Design respectively for two textbooks.
He consults with travel agents and tour operators worldwide.
Dr. Rains is currently working with a three-nation accessible tourism consortium
(Turismo para Todos) in South America, a consortium
involving a municipality and several universities in Thailand,
and serves as consultant on tourism programming for the start-up tv channel
[with]TV. His daily column is the Rolling
Rains Report on Travel, Disability & Universal Design at
www.RollingRains.com is reprinted at various other sites.