Jay Howard has opened up about a harrowing ordeal during her travels in Spain that left her eager to return to the UK. The reality star, 32, revealed that several distressing incidents occurred during her trip, which completely ‘ruined’ her holiday.
In an exclusive interview, the Accrington-born star said: “[It was] around 10 years ago, it’s happened a couple of times in Spain, to be fair. Like Salou, my sister was working in Salou for a term out there in the summer time.
“She did like musical theatre and all that kind of stuff so I went out to go and meet her and [the locals] kicked me out of fruit and veg stalls, they refused to give me bottles of water, when I was offering to pay, they were checking my money to see if it was real.
“I was just like wow, yeah – mental. Every restaurant that I went to they’d refuse me or they’d serve my friends and then didn’t serve me. Brought their food out and were [to me] like, ‘no you’re not welcome here’.
“And I was like, ‘why?’ and they were just like, ‘no, not welcome’. They wouldn’t give me an answer.” In 2023, Jay made history as the first disabled cast member on E4’s Married At First Sight.
Although she can’t say for certain, she believes it was her limb difference that caused such a reaction from Spanish locals. “Got kicked off a tourist bus in Barcelona [too],” she continued. “I find it funny now but at the time I was devastated, I was frightened to death, I wanted to come home.
“It ruined my whole holiday. I was there for 10 days and I thought, ‘nah I can’t be here for 10 days, there is no way’. That was three days in, I thought, ‘I need to go home’.”
Regrettably, Jay’s ordeal isn’t unique. In 2021, the government’s UK Disability Survey found that more than half of disabled people worry about being harassed or insulted in public places, while a similar proportion reported mistreatment due to a disability.
Statistics fromtravel firm Ocean Holidays also reveal that ‘negative experiences’ when booking or going on holiday have impacted ‘65% of disabled people’s attitudes towards travelling’. A further 51% of respondents with a disability associated holidays with stress too.
Amidst these challenges, Jay recently became an ambassador for limb difference charity Reach and is now hosting public speaking events in various schools, workplaces and businesses. Last November, she also led a new chat show Unfiltered Women on ITV alongside Samantha Renke and Fats Timbo to discuss holiday nightmares and everything else about living in a ‘disabling world’.
“It’s something that’s never been done before, people loved it, they want more of it,” Jay said. “It was light-hearted and it went the way that I wanted it to go, it wasn’t all doom and gloom, it wasn’t all like ‘feel sorry for the disabled [people]’.
“It was more, ‘this is how we live but we live in a positive way’. And the stuff that we are talking about is the stuff that people want to know but they daren’t ask because they think they are going to open a can of worms.”
Reflecting on her holiday nightmare, she added: “Thankfully it hasn’t happened since, I went to Barcelona briefly before I went on a cruise last year and I was fine. But to be fair, I was only there for one day. That one day I was ok, nothing happened.”