Cruise company refuses play facilities to disabled

A five year old boy British boy was refused access to the children’s play area on a cruise ship because he wears pull-up nappies.

The boy has Down’s Syndrome and uses the nappies to ensure that his erratic toilet control doesn’t damage his clothing. The refusal upset the boy and ruined the family’s holiday, they say. The staff at Kidzone on a Thomson cruise ship travelling around the Greek Islands, said that the boy would not be allowed to mix with other children but could use the play area once other children had left it.

The family say that the boy wanted to play with other children and not to be discriminated against in this way and that using the facilities alone was clearly more distressing to him than not using them at all because it marked him out. Thomson Holidays has said ‘… it holds the satisfaction of all passengers in very high regard and is sorry to hear of the family’s dissatisfaction with their recent cruise holiday.’ As well as saying they will conduct a full and thorough investigation in to the matter.

It’s a tricky question – clearly children with disabilities should not be discriminated against on cruise holidays, as the charities Mencap and the Down’s Syndrome Association have made clear in their comments on the case, but equally, with fears of transmission of bacteria and other hygiene issues that have plagued cruise ships in recent years, many ships have imposed a rule about children who are not toilet trained using play areas because of the difficulty of cleaning complex equipment and the risk of causing viruses or other problems to spread from person to person.