This account came my way following a recent blog I wrote about attitudes to the word "disabled". It veers off on an interesting tangent, so I'm posting it here, rather than as a comment on the blog.
One of our site visitors was recently staying with his stroke-survivor wheelchair-user wife at a Premier Inn in Swansea on holiday. They chose this hotel because they were used to other Premier Inns providing rooms that are useable by her, albeit not ideal.
They would prefer to stay in more individual establishments, but the problem is the lack of reliable standards for a "disabled room", "accessible room", or whatever other term you use. This time round, however, they were disappointed to find that even in a chain, you can't count on consistency.
Despite being classified as "disabled", they found that:
• Bed was too low
• Toilet also too low (until they supplied a seat raiser which made it too high)
• Support rails round toilet too low and too far from toilet.
• Bathroom ensuite sliding door too heavy to be moved from a wheelchair
• Doors throughout the hotel on strong springs and so a complete barrier to a wheelchair user
• Shower in bath completely inaccessible to a wheelchair user.
No criticism to be made of the staff, who did their best to be helpful, but nevertheless, the hotel was clearly not providing facilities that could be used by guests with impaired mobility, despite claiming to do so.
I'd be interested to know of any other experiences staying in hotels; how reliable are the descriptions of facilities available? Do you think there should be a national standard that has to be met before a hotel can claim that a room is accessible?
We stayed at one of the two Premier Inns in Swansea and our room had a very good level entry shower. I guess your contributor must have stayed in the other one!
I guess there is no absolute answer to the question of consistently defining what makes a hotel room or anywhere else accessible. Like everything else, it depends on the level of impairment and need of the person making the booking. What is possible (and what we try to do at Accessible Property Register)is to list access features in detail so that visitors can make informed decisions.
The good news is that Premier Inn are currently having a full access survey of all their hotels undertaken by Disability Go. They do seem to be committed to the goal of universal access and are intending to publish full details on access features of all Premier Inn hotels once the survey is complete. We shall certainly be publicising this once the survey is complete!
Conrad Hodgkinson
www.accessible-property.org.uk
This problem is just the 'tip of the iceberg'. It is a shame that companies providing facilites and other services for the public are still refusing to embrace the concept of Wheelchair accessible design guideline. That is why Miva Partnership Limited has taken the initiative to promote the design and building of wheelchair accessible properties for open market rent and sale. Miva Partnership believes that people with disabilities should have the choice to build ,buy or rent properties that meet their individual need.
Kofi A. Dzorkplenu
www.mivapartnership.com
Some excellent points in this thread. It seems the larger the company is, the less accessible their stroefronts and head offices are. Buildings such as banks in my area for example all lack ramps and rails at their entraces.
In fact, just yesterday I visited a disability store which had a rather steep step at its doorway. Remarkable.
Kaya Ismail
www.stepping-out.org
I found a similar problem a few years ago when my husband became disabled through an accident and after enjoying holidays together finding suitable hotels became a really big issue for us.
We heard about a couple of companies offering specific holidays in the UK, abroad isn't an option any longer. Places such as Vitalise and Bond Holidays have been fantastic for us. Both offer really good accommodation and were reccommended to us highly by other people when we began looking around.
As a group with a support group we attend we went with Bond Holidays to their hotel in Lytham St Annes and it was great, everything was there for us and it made such a difference not to have to say is there a step into your accessible shower? That point cropped up a lot and staff at your bigger chain hotels just aren't trained enough to know that. Vitalise were the same, we went just the two of us and it was really relaxing. I would return to both and will be doing this year.
It is a shame there isn't a set standard in the tourism industry for normal hotels to turn to so we can all enjoy them instead of being a "pain"
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Web accessibility encompasses all disabilities that affect access to the Web, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities. The document "How People with Disabilities Use the Web" describes how different disabilities affect Web use and includes scenarios of people with disabilities using the Web.