Tarryn Tomlinson
Founder · Innovator · Writer · Traveller · Unapologetic Disruptor
" She didn't choose this world.
It chose her. And she chose to change it. "
How it all started ...
I didn't grow up wanting to change the travel industry.
I grew up wanting to see the world.
There's a difference - and for a long time, that difference mattered enormously to me. I wasn't interested in systems or policy or the quiet machinery of exclusion. I was interested in cobblestones and coastlines and the particular quality of light in places I'd only ever read about.
Then, in my final year of high school, life handed me a plot twist I hadn't written.
I acquired a disability. My world contracted overnight. And somewhere in the recalibration that followed — the grief, the fury, the ruthless practicality you develop when you have no other option - I made a decision that has quietly shaped everything since.
I was still going to travel.
Not despite what had happened. Not to prove anything to anyone. But because shrinking was never going to be my answer.
Cape Town 1998
What I didn't anticipate was how much travelling would teach me.
I learned to read a hotel the way other people read a room - for what's said and unsaid. I catalogued what I came to call the quiet architecture of exclusion. The step nobody flagged. The bathroom door that almost worked.
The lobby that forgot that everyone deserves to reach the front desk.
Rome 2008
I noticed things that most travellers never have to notice. And I couldn't stop noticing once I'd started.
So I did something with it.
I trained. I consulted. I built AVA - the world's first Accessibility Virtual Assistant AI. I assessed hospitality spaces from Italy to Africa. I advised governments and municipalities and luxury hotel groups. I wrote. I presented television. I climbed Kilimanjaro - not as metaphor, but as a very literal way of putting barriers in full view and standing above them.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped being a traveller who happened to work in access.
I became someone who understood, at a level most people never have to, what it actually costs a person when the world isn't designed for them.
And what it feels like when it is.
Mt Kilimanjaro 2020
That understanding is what Able2Travel is built on.
You've earned your adventures. You know what you want — and more importantly, you know what you don't want. You don't want to spend your carefully planned holiday compensating for details someone else overlooked. You don't want to arrive somewhere beautiful and discover that one small thing changes everything.
You want to arrive knowing.
That's what we do.
Every journey we create has been interrogated - not with a checklist, but with twenty years of knowing exactly what questions to ask and exactly what answers aren't good enough. Every property vetted. Every transfer tested. Every assumption held up against reality rather than a brochure.
By the time your itinerary reaches you, the work is already done.
All that remains is the journey itself.
Because the best travel stories don't begin with despite everything, it turned out alright.
They begin with from the moment we arrived.