How to land a truly accessible hotel room
Travelling for persons with physical disabilities continues to improve despite the many horror stories you can always expect. It simply requires patience, perseverance, knowing what questions to ask and being resourceful.
Furniture by the bed can be problematic for wheelchair users.
So, for now, let’s imagine that you flew to your destination and your wheelchair miraculously survived the trip (OK, let’s just be positive). Next challenge? Your accommodations, particularly hotel rooms. We’ve found a few web sites that provide a lot of helpful hints on how to navigate this critical part of your trip:
http://www.wheelchairtraveling.com/
5 REASONS TO MAKE ACCESSIBLEGO YOUR GO-TO TRAVEL RESOURCE
A SIMPLE GUIDE TO BOOKING HOTELS FOR WHEELCHAIR USERS
7 Wheelchair Accessible Hotel Room Problems — and Solutions
Unfortunately, there are a lot of variables involved in nailing that perfect room and be prepared that you may not find that perfect accessible room. The definition of accessible has different meaning to each property, despite a more robust explanation these days of what should go into designing an accessible room. For example, one of the most annoying things involves the card key access to your room. For those with dexterity problems, good luck opening your door. Or the weight of the door. Or the placement of furniture by the door which makes it difficult to open and go through the door if you’re a wheelchair user.
Furniture situated too close to the door becomes problematic for a wheelchair user.
It’s nearly impossible to tell if the beds are comfortable for your needs. How could someone describe the firmness of the mattress on the web or even over the phone? That’s important in order to avoid pressure sores which can easily occur overnight if one sleeps on an inappropriate bed.
One of the best things to do is to find a hotel that meets your basic criteria and then call it directly (not through the main reservation line) and ask to speak with someone who is very knowledgeable about the accessible room. Explain what you’re trying to do which is to get detailed information about the room since the web sites rarely include the pictures we’d need to determine the basic accessibility of the room. Most importantly, and this is being done more frequently, you can ask for that person to shoot a short video of the room and send it to you, basically a virtual tour of the room. Now, we must profess that smaller independent hotels may not be as cooperative as the national chains in this area.
Before you start with your hotel search, make a list of amenities and requirements your room must meet and a good way of doing that is to look at your own bedroom and bathroom situation and make notes of what you must have. You may not get 100% of what you want but you should be able to check off a lot of the boxes on your checklist.