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)

A Global Study of 235 Airports

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.

The Sunflower Is Common – Other Support Is Not

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.

Recognition Versus Environmental Accessibility

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.

Reconsidering Singapore and Gold Coast

This wider dataset makes the examples I explored in Part 1 more meaningful.

Gold Coast Airport's Social Stories, maps and virtual familiarisation resources no longer seem like insignificant additions when written Social Stories appeared at only 17.02% of airports in the global sample. They represent an attempt to change what passengers know about the journey before they encounter it, potentially increasing familiarity and predictability. (SciELO)

Singapore Changi's Calm Room represents another approach again. Rather than only identifying passengers who might require additional assistance, it attempts to change the environment available to them. This feels important when considered alongside the limitation identified within the global research: recognising an invisible disability does not automatically make the sensory environment itself accessible.

However, my questions from Part 1 still remain. More provision does not necessarily mean perfect provision. Gold Coast's preparation resources cannot account for every unexpected disruption, while a shared Calm Room cannot necessarily accommodate every individual's sensory requirements.

What these examples appear to demonstrate is not a perfect solution, but airports beginning to address different layers of accessibility rather than relying on a single intervention.

Does Airport Size Matter?

Another finding I found interesting was the relationship between airport size and accessibility initiatives. Familiarisation tours were much more common among smaller airports in the study, with 76.2% of these initiatives occurring at airports handling fewer than five million passengers annually. None of the airports serving more than 40 million passengers offered this type of programme. (SciELO)

This creates an interesting problem for international travel. Large international hubs may be precisely the environments where unfamiliarity, crowds, navigation and sensory demands become most complex, yet some highly personalised forms of preparation may become harder to provide as airport size and operational complexity increase.

It suggests that accessibility cannot necessarily rely on interventions that require significant one-to-one resources. For major international airports, there may be value in considering how some of the benefits of familiarisation could be provided independently, repeatedly and on demand.

This connects back to Gold Coast's use of digital information and a virtual airport tour, as well as my earlier Technology and Autism research. Digital experiences may potentially provide familiarity and control without requiring the airport to physically conduct an individual familiarisation visit every time.

Reflection

This research has given me a much clearer baseline against which I can judge airports that appear to be going further.

The most striking finding is the difference between recognition and meaningful environmental accessibility. Within this particular sample of 235 Sunflower-associated airports, almost all used the Sunflower lanyard, while substantially fewer provided some of the additional strategies identified by the researchers. (SciELO)

This does not mean that the Sunflower is ineffective. Recognition, understanding and staff awareness can be extremely important. Instead, it suggests that one accessibility intervention cannot address every barrier created by an airport journey.

This strengthens my interest in airports such as Singapore Changi and Gold Coast because their approaches begin to extend accessibility into the environment, preparation and passenger experience. At the same time, my primary and secondary research suggests that even these stronger examples have limitations when individual sensory needs conflict or when the real journey becomes unpredictable.

I am therefore beginning to see “going the extra mile” not as having one particularly impressive autism-friendly feature, but as addressing accessibility across multiple parts of the passenger experience while allowing different travellers to retain choice and control.

This also gives me an important question to carry into my later triangulation: if recognising hidden disability is now relatively widespread among airports participating in the Sunflower programme, where is design still failing to change the actual experience of travelling through the airport?