Digital Accessibility in Tourism and the Limitations of Technical Assessment Indicators: A Source-Critical Airline Case Analysis

Whether technical accessibility findings justify conclusions about tourism participation depends on what they establish about travelers’ opportunities for action, a relationship examined here through the interpretation of heterogeneous evidence. Methodologically, the study combines a critical narrative evidence synthesis with bounded bibliometric mapping and an exploratory secondary analysis of published airline audits. A Crossref rerun on 24 October 2026 yielded 700 export positions and 593 unique digital object identifiers (DOIs); applying the reported selection rules recovered the same 34-title bibliometric corpus. Technical audit and digital booking journey scores were reconstructed for 11 airlines assessed between March and June 2023. Spearman’s rho was 0.440, with substantial resampling uncertainty. Four conflicts between the summary tables and airline profiles, along with a potentially related arithmetic discrepancy, were explicitly retained. Across 16 component-based source variants, rho ranged from 0.418 to 0.521. A machine-readable statement schema links reconstructed values to their measurement dimensions, scales, temporal context, and sources. Divergent rankings illustrate non-identical orderings within the audited cases; they do not constitute a validated test of practical non-interchangeability. The contribution lies in linking source reconstruction, provenance-preserving statements, and sensitivity analysis within one documented tourism case. Population-level equivalence, current legal compliance, and individual participation outcomes cannot be inferred.