HotelChatter || Do You Have Wheelchair Access?

This week our roving correspondent Monica Guy is writing about an oft-overlooked aspect of hotels and travel: disabled access. Monica knows a lot about this subject as she works and travels frequently with Stephen Hawking. However, feel free to chime in with your thoughts and experiences too. Got a question? Let us know and we'll get it answered for you.

The pool at the Access Centre in Turkey.

"Do you have wheelchair access?" It's a simple question, but one which causes anything between pained embarrassment and outright disdain when asked to hoteliers of many European hotels.

Accessibility of hotels is a subject we feel passionate about, although it's not the sexist subject in the hotel world. Partly because one of our bosses is both a wheelchair user and a nutcase traveller, staying in top hotels all over the world for much of the year.

Partly also because accessible tourism is becoming the next big thing; older and disabled travellers are quickly waking up to the fact that they can travel independently with friends and family, and no longer need to go in organised groups of oldies and other disabled people.

Accessible Hotels
In the US, strict laws and a more developed culture of accessible travel means that finding hotels and restaurants with wheelchair access is not generally a problem. Almost all hotels, especially the biggies, have a large percentage of accessible rooms with various facilities, and their restaurants and lobbies have disabled toilets. Special diets and other needs can generally be catered for with a bit of advance notice.

But the situation in Europe is nowhere near the same. We've spent the week checking out 4- and 5-star hotels in Paris for our boss, who's visiting Paris soon, and reactions of staff have varied wildly. From "wheelchair accessible? I dunno [read: I don't care]" to "well, if he has a large electric wheelchair that won't fit in the loo that's his problem." It's incredibly frustrating, and we'd love to hear from readers who've experienced similar problems.

A Few Tips
A couple of things to look out for if you have a disability and are planning to visit Paris or any other European country:

Don't believe the website even if it states a place is wheelchair accessible. Especially the boutique or design hotels. Paris's Hotel du Petit Moulin, Hotel Lumen, Hotel l'A, and several others all claim to offer access, but in reality their doors and lifts are so narrow that only the skinniest of wheelchairs could get through them.

Or 'wheelchair access' means a place is only partially accessible. The Jardins du Marais hotel boasts 12 'disabled' rooms, for instance, but has no way to get down to the restaurant and bar. Hoteliers often assume that wheelchair users can get out of their chair in order to climb up a couple of steps to the lift.....and disabled toilets are generally nowhere to be seen in the lobbies.

Also be wary of automatically accepting a 'disabled room'. Mostly, they've taken an ordinary-sized room, knocked down the toilet wall, and expanded the bathroom so that it takes up most of the room. If you don't want to jump from door straight to bed and the size of the bathroom isn't so important, take a suite instead.

The best hotels for access are the IBIS and ETAP hotel chains. Okay, so they're not the coolest places to stay....but sometimes you have to go for practicality. And it'll save you so many pennies you can splash out on being cool elsewhere.

Got any tips for your fellow readers about disabled access in hotels? Share them in comments or drop us a line.

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