10 Independent Wheelchair Travel Blogs to Follow in 2026

Last updated: November 2026

Jaziba Luqman writes TheDailyFront's wheelchair-accessibility travel series, cross-checking tourism claims against official accessibility records, specialist physical audits, operator information, and traveler accounts.

A wheelchair traveler exploring a historic European stone-paved piazza in warm sunlight — First-hand reports from independent wheelchair bloggers often make the difference between a confident itinerary and an unexpected barrier at the door. (AI-generated)

Before almost every trip, there is a quiet moment most people never notice. You are looking at a hotel page or a city guide, it says "accessible," and you have to decide whether to believe it. For a wheelchair user, that one word can mean a step-free room with a roll-in shower, or it can mean two heavy steps right at the front door.

In that moment, the most useful person in the world is a stranger who has already been there and wrote down what actually happened: which entrance works, which ramp is too steep, and which cobbled street to avoid. The bloggers in this article have been that trusted stranger for thousands of readers, doing the legwork from their own lived experience. We wanted to say thank you properly.

Why this list matters: Every blog below is run by an individual wheelchair user or a small family team rather than a corporate travel brand or tourism board. Nobody paid or traded links to be included. We use these exact sites to cross-check real-world lived experiences alongside our technical accessibility audits.

In this guide: What We Do · How We Chose · 1. Curb Free with Cory Lee · 2. Simply Emma · 3. Wheelchair Travel · 4. Spin the Globe · 5. Free Wheelin' · 6. Accessible Japan · 7. Have Wheelchair Will Travel · 8. Little Miss Turtle · 9. Carrie-Ann Lightley · 10. Wheelchair Traveling · A Last Thank You · Sources

What We Do at The Daily Front

At The Daily Front, we write wheelchair accessibility guides for places that describe themselves as accessible. We take what a tourism board or an attraction says, set it beside local accessibility audits, official statements, measured ramp slopes, and what disabled travelers report on the ground, and write down where those things agree and where they do not.

Our guides to Montepulciano, Bergamo, Volterra, and Lucca work this way, and our Europe Wheelchair Accessible Travel Guide pulls 17 cities together under the same lens. Doing this research day after day showed us just how much we rely on the people below.

How We Chose These Blogs

Each blog featured here is run by one person or a small family team, not by a tourism board or a large company, and each one is focused directly on wheelchair travel. The order is not a ranking. This is an independent editorial list, and nobody paid to be on it.

1. Curb Free with Cory Lee

Cory Lee

Cory Lee has visited more than 55 countries across all seven continents in a power wheelchair, and his multi-award-winning blog is where many wheelchair users first learn that global travel on that scale is genuinely possible. What we admire most in his archive is the sheer geographic range and lack of snobbery. Weekend guides to Niagara Falls and Cobb County, Georgia receive the exact same careful logistical breakdown as bucket-list trips to Morocco, Antarctica, or India, so a nervous first-time traveler and an experienced flyer can both find immediate value.

Beyond destination guides, Cory has published children's books about accessible travel and actively brings his community along for the ride. He is currently putting together a Curb Free Italy group trip for 2027. As people who spend our days reading about Italian cobblestones and historic ZTL rules, seeing him lead groups through Italy made us smile.

2. Simply Emma

Emma Muldoon

Emma Muldoon has been writing Simply Emma from Scotland since 2014, building one of the UK's most reliable independent resources for power wheelchair users. Her accessible travel guides, cottage reviews, and hotel room breakdowns include the exact photographic proof travelers need—turning space, bed height, and bathroom grab-rail placement—so you can actually plan and book with confidence. Crucially, she reviews live events too, meaning a concert gig or a night at the theatre gets the same rigorous access check as a hotel room.

Major tourism bodies have noticed her precision. Visit Glasgow worked with her on an official accessible day trip guide, and her voice consistently pushes UK hospitality toward better transparency. If you are planning anything in Scotland, England, or wider Europe, this is a great place to start.

3. Wheelchair Travel

John Morris

After surviving a car accident in 2012 and becoming a triple amputee, John Morris turned his passion for aviation and transit into Wheelchair Travel. He has been publishing structured accessibility guides for years, logging more than a million miles in the air and covering cities across the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Alongside his destination reporting sit plain-language legal and logistical FAQs on the Air Carrier Access Act, damaged wheelchair claims, hotels, public bus ramps, and European rail bookings—the exact high-stakes questions every traveler eventually asks.

John also keeps a public directory of other accessible travel blogs. Actively sending readers to fellow independent writers who could easily be seen as competitors is a generous thing to do, and his directory helped us verify several names on this list.

4. Spin the Globe

Sylvia Longmire

Sylvia Longmire is a medically retired Air Force veteran, multiple sclerosis advocate, and power wheelchair user who turned her solo international travels into Spin the Globe—a place where wheelchair users can see a trip as a logistical puzzle to plan rather than something to fear. While she covers global land destinations from Reykjavik to Dubai, cruising is her undisputed specialty. She has taken more than 40 cruises and wrote a comprehensive book on wheelchair-accessible cruising, published in 2020.

Because she also runs an accessible travel agency and contributes regularly to outlets like Forbes, what she writes comes with real insider knowledge of how bookings, tender ports, and cabin dimensions actually work. We would send anyone nervous about a first cruise or solo trip straight to her.

5. Free Wheelin' with Karin Willison

Karin Willison

Free Wheelin' is an accessible North American road trip blog at heart. Karin Willison drives her adapted van thousands of miles across the United States and into parts of Canada with her service dog, Aria, whom she trained herself. Her posts cover practical problems that only show up when you hit the highway independently—from navigating national park boardwalks and finding accessible roadside restrooms to calling out the frustrating gap between a hotel room advertised as "ADA accessible" and one that actually works.

Her holiday travel survival guide is a great example of her style: practical, hard-earned, and honest about how exhausting travel can be. The blog is candid about disability life beyond trips as well, and that openness is a big part of why her recommendations feel so trustworthy.

6. Accessible Japan

Josh Grisdale

When Canadian-born power wheelchair user Josh Grisdale moved to Tokyo in 2007, he found plenty of helpful transit infrastructure and accessible public toilets on the ground, but almost nothing written in English about getting around Japan in a wheelchair. He started writing it himself. Accessible Japan has since grown into an indispensable database of hotels with true accessible rooms, temple access reviews, subway navigation tips, and wheelchair-friendly day tours.

Josh has since become a naturalized Japanese citizen, advised official tourism panels, and recently expanded the platform with a travel agent hub. In 2025, the site won the Best Website for Accessible Travel award at the Travel for Every Body Accessible Travel Awards. If Japan is anywhere on your bucket list, read his database before you book.

7. Have Wheelchair Will Travel

Julie Jones & Family

Based in Australia, Have Wheelchair Will Travel is a family blog at its core, and that perspective is its greatest strength. Julie Jones co-founded it inspired by travels with her son Braeden, who lives with cerebral palsy. Because traveling as a family involves different packing lists, hoist-equipped accommodations, beach wheelchairs, and pacing than solo travel, Julie's honest trip reports give parents and caregivers the ordinary, practical side of traveling together—not only the polished highlights.

Its archives cover Australia, Hawaii, Singapore, Japan, and the US mainland in depth. Even academic institutions rely on her work; the University of Montana lists it, together with Curb Free and Little Miss Turtle, on its official education abroad page for wheelchair access and travel, which says a lot about the readers who trust it.

8. Little Miss Turtle

Melanie

Melanie started Little Miss Turtle in 2015 as a hobby while looking for answers to her own manual wheelchair travel questions, and her guides now range from Tokyo to Disneyland and alpine trails in Banff. Having lived in both Paraguay and Europe, she has written a great deal about Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, and Spain, always keeping a sharp eye out for independent manual wheelchair users.

Her Japan advice is thorough enough that Josh Grisdale's Accessible Japan published her guest guide to a one-day wheelchair trip to Kamakura. Melanie is especially good with the small architectural details that decide whether a trip works, like her early reminder that true roll-in showers without a wet-room step are surprisingly rare in standard Japanese hotels.

9. Carrie-Ann Lightley

Carrie-Ann Lightley

Carrie-Ann Lightley has been blogging about accessible travel from the UK's Lake District and across Europe since 2010, which in travel blog years makes her a true pioneer. Her accessibility reviews, city guides, and aviation tips have appeared in major outlets including The Guardian, HuffPost, and TripAdvisor, and she has repeatedly been named among the UK's most influential disabled people in the Shaw Trust's Disability Power 100.

Alongside her blog and her work in accessible tourism marketing with AccessAble, she has said she began writing to celebrate businesses that go above and beyond for accessibility rather than focusing only on barriers—and you can feel that constructive, welcoming spirit in every place she recommends.

10. Wheelchair Traveling

Ashley Lyn Olson

Founded by paraplegic world traveler Ashley Lyn Olson back in 2006, Wheelchair Traveling began as a personal journal and has grown into a massive community-backed guide with destination tips for places such as Hawaii, Japan, small towns in Texas, and Australia's beaches. Ashley pairs her own outdoor adventures—adaptive kayaking, handcycling, and national park camping—with first-hand stories from the wider community.

We especially appreciate the prominent reminder her site carries that physical accessibility can change, urging readers to double-check before they go. It is the exact same reason we write our own audit breakdowns. Its Europe section, which includes rugged routes in the Pyrénées, is well worth a look for anyone planning on our side of the map.

A Last Thank You

None of the writers above owe anyone a trip report. Measuring bathroom doorways, photographing curb cuts, and documenting transit failures takes hours out of a holiday, yet they share what they learn so the next traveler rolls into a hotel lobby or a historic center with fewer unpleasant surprises. If you use one of these blogs in 2026, leave a comment or tell them it helped. It means far more than most readers realize.

Accessibility changes over time, and every blogger on this list would say the same: always check before you go. If you are planning an Italian trip and want measured ramp slopes and door widths alongside traveler reports, see our guides to San Gimignano, Siena, Orvieto, Perugia, and Assisi. And if we missed an independent blog you rely on, send it to us through the contact form on our site and we will gladly take a look.