At 23, Hailey Brown founded assistive tech company Vacayit, which aims to help blind and low-vision tourists make informed decisions about their holiday.
Many kids dream of being doctors or astronauts or zookeepers. But Hailey Brown has long travelled off the beaten path. In fact, from the age of 12, she wanted to be the managing director of Tourism Australia – by 30.
She’s taken a detour, albeit a small one. At 23, Brown has founded an assistive technology app that makes tourism more accessible for blind and low-vision travellers. She is neither blind nor low-vision, but is fiery about the topic.
It’s just unfortunate, she says, that she didn’t always have that entrepreneurial spirit founders tend to speak of. “That always makes for a good story,” she says.
Instead, she had a raging travel bug. The day after Brown graduated high school, she packed up for a year abroad, making her way through 10 different countries. She would come home with a major epiphany: “I really love people and travel.”
But here’s the issue: tourists living with disabilities can often struggle to make informed decisions about where to holiday. But the market size is undeniable. The World Health Organisation estimates that 15% of the world’s population lives with some kind of disability. In Australia, more than 460,000 Australians are blind or have low vision, and accessible tourism is predicted to take up 25% of the total tourism market by 2025.
Read the full story on Forbes Australia
Hailey participated in the 2022 Ventures ilab Accelerator program and pitched her idea at the ilab Pitch Night.
Want to take your venture to the next level just like Hailey did? Apply for the 2023 Ventures ilab Accelerator program today. Applications close 13 October.
