After looking more closely at Singapore Changi and Gold Coast Airport, I wanted to understand whether these airports really are unusual. It is easy to describe an airport as going “above and beyond”, but this needs something to compare it against. I therefore looked for research that examined accessibility across a much larger number of airports worldwide.
I found a particularly relevant global study, Airport Accessibility for Neurodivergent Passengers: A Global Survey of Initiatives and its Implications. Rather than studying passengers directly, the researchers examined airport websites to establish what accessibility strategies airports publicly offered to neurodivergent passengers. This gives me a useful wider picture of what is currently common within airports and which interventions remain relatively unusual. (SciELO)
The researchers began with airports officially participating in the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower programme. They identified 231 airports through the programme and added four Brazilian airports, creating a sample of 235 airports worldwide. The sample included airports of different sizes and ownership structures across North America, South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. No African airports were included because none appeared within the Sunflower dataset used to construct the sample, which is an important limitation when considering the research as a global picture. (SciELO)
The researchers then visited the airports' websites and recorded the additional accessibility strategies available beyond the Sunflower lanyard. They identified 37 different strategies, which were grouped into six categories: attitudinal, familiarisation, structural, service-based, informational and communicational. (SciELO)
This is particularly useful for my research because it moves beyond individual examples. Instead of simply finding airports with interesting accessibility initiatives, I can begin to understand how common those initiatives actually are.
Unsurprisingly, the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower was by far the most widespread intervention. It was identified at 232 of the 235 airports (98.7%). The researchers classify this as an attitudinal strategy: it allows somebody with a non-visible disability to discreetly communicate that they may require additional time, understanding or assistance. (SciELO)
However, this finding also exposes an important limitation. The Sunflower can help change how a passenger is recognised and treated, but it does not itself change the physical or sensory environment through which that passenger has to travel. Autism Spectrum Australia similarly summarises the study by noting that the lanyard can encourage recognition and assistance while leaving the airport's physical and sensory conditions unchanged. (Autism Spectrum Australia (Aspect))
The difference between the Sunflower and the next most common initiative is striking. Written Social Stories were available at only 40 of the 235 airports, or 17.02%. The researchers also found that familiarisation tours were particularly associated with smaller airports; notably, none of the airports handling more than 40 million passengers annually in this sample offered them. The authors suggest that the operational complexity of very large airports may make these programmes more difficult to implement. (SciELO)
For me, this begins to create a clearer distinction between an airport recognising hidden disability and actively changing the travel experience for neurodivergent passengers.
This distinction connects strongly to what emerged from my primary research. One participant told me:
“The sunflower lounges are often still quite open and loud and not tailored to autistic people/sensory needs.”
The global airport research helps put this comment into a wider context. The Sunflower programme is extremely widespread within the particular airport sample studied, but recognition alone cannot remove noise, crowds, uncertainty, confusing navigation or sensory overload.
This makes me question what should actually count as an “autism-friendly airport”. An airport may have adopted a recognised hidden-disability scheme and therefore appear accessible on its website, while the physical experience of moving through that airport may have changed very little.
The study's six categories are useful here because they show that accessibility can operate at several levels. Staff attitudes and disability recognition matter, but so do familiarisation, physical environments, services, information and communication. An airport addressing several of these areas appears to be doing something fundamentally different from one relying mainly on a lanyard.
This wider dataset makes the examples I explored in Part 1 more meaningful.