How two friends with disabilities and hard work made travelling around the world accessible to everyone.

Going on vacation can pose a unique challenge for people with physical disabilities. This was a huge concern for Alvaro Silberstein, when he began trying to go and explore Torres del Paine National Park in Chile back in 2016. This kind of trip, with such rough terrain and not that many disability-accessible options, was a nightmare for Alvaro, as he was left paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair after a car accident as a teenager.

When he and his friend Camilo Navarro began to think on how they could accomplish this, they knew they needed help, money, and a lot of patience, so the first step was to do a successful crowdfunding campaign to finance a scouting trip and the purchase of a state-of-the-art hiking wheelchair. This was so successful that he became the first to complete the Patagonia trek by wheelchair.

Then, in 2018, when Alvaro and Camilo graduated from school at UC Berkeley, California, they knew that this was something worth exploring, and decided to launch Wheel the World! The website connects people all over the world who have physical disabilities with customizable tour packages, depending on the person's needs. These Trip packages can include adaptive equipment such as amphibious wheelchairs (to be used at the beach, in a pool, and in the ocean) and adaptive kayaks, which can help those with various physical disabilities to kayak, for example.

It all begins with a form that customers can fill out on "Wheel the World's" website, detailing where they wish to go and the type of accommodations they require. They then can purchase trips to various destinations, all over the world, from New York City, Hawaii, Paris, London, Machu Picchu, and even safaris in Kruger National Park in South Africa or Serengeti National Park in Tanzania.

Learn more about this solution here https://wheeltheworld.com/

This story was adapted from https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/09/wheel-the-world-raises-2m-to-provide-u... and https://mashable.com/article/wheel-the-world-accessible-travel

The images were taken from https://thesigmundproject.org/open-source-posts/wheel-the-world and https://www.travelpulse.com/news/features/wheel-the-world-is-making-trav... as we do not own any of them.