From Wheelchair to World Explorer

Camilo Navarro, co-founder and COO of Wheel the World, delivered a keynote-style fireside chat at ITB Berlin 2026 on the diversity and inclusion track, hosted by Charlotte Lamp Davies. The session opened with a video showcasing Oregon as the first US state verified by Wheel the World, framing accessible travel as a mainstream opportunity rather than a niche concern.

Navarro grounded the talk in a deeply personal origin story: his best friend and co-founder became a wheelchair user at age 18 following a car accident. Their shared experience of navigating a world riddled with physical barriers — floors too thick to wheel across, beds too high to transfer onto, bathrooms with no roll-in shower — became the catalyst for Wheel the World. The inflection point came when the two friends planned a trip to Torres del Paine (Patagonia, Chile), one of the most visited destinations in Chile, and found zero usable accessibility information online. They acquired a specialized trekking wheelchair, partnered with a local hotel, and became the first expedition to complete the W Track with a wheelchair user. A sponsorship from Norface and a short viral video followed — Mark Zuckerberg shared it — and the founders were suddenly receiving hundreds of requests from both would-be travelers and destinations across New York, Barcelona, Tokyo, London, and Berlin seeking to replicate their accessibility guide.

The market-size data Navarro presented was striking: in Europe alone, 150 million trips are taken annually by people with accessibility needs, generating €100 billion in spending, yet 80% of those travelers report terrible experiences. The root cause, in his diagnosis, is not a lack of physical infrastructure but a near-total absence of specific, reliable accessibility information. Regulatory compliance ('we follow the ADA/EU standards') is insufficient because accessibility needs are deeply individual — two wheelchair users may require completely different bed heights, turning radii, or shower configurations.

Wheel the World's response is a data-collection and verification engine that captures more than 200 accessibility data points per listing. The platform helps destinations get verified, market that information through multiple channels (including AI-powered chatbots), surface it through direct booking channels, and improve over time. In two years the company signed up 140 destinations globally, claiming more than €60 million in measurable impact across bookings, marketing visibility, and continuous-improvement support. The recently closed Series A will fund a major European expansion, with Spain and Germany identified as the most receptive markets so far.

On AI, Navarro was notably specific: rather than using general large language models, Wheel the World is training small language models on top of LLMs, fine-tuned on their proprietary accessibility dataset, to generate individualized travel recommendations. The vision is a Google Maps-style rating system that gives each user a personal match score for a venue based on their unique access needs — replacing hours of fragmented research with a single, confident recommendation. The 50-person company (majority software engineers and product/UX staff) also applies AI internally to accelerate prototyping and iteration.

Navarro closed by reframing success: the Series A is not a celebration but a means to an end. True success means more people with disabilities traveling more and better, and — at a broader level — proving to the world that accessibility-focused companies can be highly profitable, thereby inspiring other startups and incumbents to build accessible products across housing, employment, and consumer goods.