Sandra van Bijl and her daughter Kyara have enjoyed coming to Efteling for twenty years. But last Friday they suddenly couldn’t go on the rides anymore. Kyara has Down syndrome and therefore uses the entrance for people with disabilities. It was so busy there on Friday that it was impossible for her. The disability card is freely downloadable and, according to Sandra, people abused it. “Groups of young people stood there while they had no disability.”
Sandra and Kyara have been making grateful use of Efteling’s facility pass for years. This allows them to go to attractions via the wheelchair entrance. “It’s not that we don’t want to stand in line. She just can’t,” Sandra explains. “My daughter has Down syndrome and can’t stand still for long. People stand very close together in the regular queue. That makes her overstimulated and then she can become aggressive. Of course you want to prevent that.”
Thanks to the facility pass, the two can still use attractions. “That has always been very well organized,” says Sandra. “You then enter a certain room where you can wait quietly. You can sit there, at a distance from other people.”
But last Friday Sandra and Kyara couldn’t go to those waiting areas. It was way too busy. “We would have to queue for seventy minutes to get to the disabled entrance. Even the one at the normal entrance, the queue was shorter, fifty minutes. That’s the world upside down.”
“This is not welcoming.”
In the past year, Sandra noticed that it was a lot busier at the wheelchair entrance, but she didn’t think too much of it. “You can’t always see from the outside that someone has a disability, so I don’t judge that.” But Friday was so busy that Sandra wondered what was going on.
When she stood in line with Kyara, groups of youths stood in front and behind them. “I asked very nicely which of them had a disability. The guys in front of me turned red and immediately turned around. The guys behind me started laughing at each other.”
When Sandra looked at them confused, the monkey came out: none of them had a disability. “They said that they had simply downloaded the facilities map from the Efteling website, because it would be very busy that day.”
Sandra was dumbfounded, she says. “So everyone can just abuse it. I think that’s outrageous. And it’s not even your turn through the wheelchair entrance.” She therefore wants to raise it with Efteling. “I hope they can come up with something for the people who feel disadvantaged right now. This is not welcoming to people with disabilities.”
“We start from the trust in our guests.”
The spokesperson for Efteling says that the facilities map can indeed be freely downloaded. The park wants to be accessible to everyone, without administrative hassle. “We assume the trust we have in our guests. When applying, we ask guests to fill in a statement in which they indicate that they cannot go through the queue independently. They must also sign that they have filled it in truthfully. “
According to the spokesperson, it is ‘obviously not the intention’ that the pass is abused. “We regularly do spot checks, where we can ask guests for a doctor’s certificate or autipas, for example. If we doubt whether people are justified in having such a card, we can also ask for it.” The spokesperson could not say on Sunday evening what the consequences would be for people who wrongfully use the facility card.