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.
For disabled travellers outside of the US, perhaps a better option than designated specially-designed accessible hotels is to go for ordinary hotel chains who take access seriously.
Three cheers in this department go to the Swedish-owned Scandic Hotel chain. They recently won two prestigious awards for their efforts in the field of disabled access. Unlike most chains, they employ a full-time disability coordinator, Magnus Bergland, to advise on access issues and train staff in how to deal with guests with disabilities.
In fact, he not only advises, he makes all new staff get into a wheelchair and follow the 'guest's route' round the hotel, from parking and the reception desk to the room, bathroom and breakfast area. It's only by doing this, he claims, that people gain any sort of understanding as to the difficulties faced by disabled guests.
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.
Accessible hotels are gradually popping up all over the hotel scene, but particularly near seaside resorts in the Mediterranean. They've been designed by architects to be suitable for guests with all sorts of different disabilities, from physical disabilities and wheelchair users to those with visual and hearing impairments.
Rooms often have hoists and lowering beds, wide doors, wheelchair-charging facilities, hand-bars everywhere, emergency cords, low-level switches, flashing or vibrating pillow alarms, accessible swimming pools, and all the rest, along with more disabled toilets than you can shake a walking stick at.
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.
When you book a hotel in, say, Paris, it's usually because you're not actually in Paris yet. That makes sense.
What makes no sense is that if you have an access need or disability, it's almost impossible to get reliable information or make a secure, discounted booking at a hotel. Unless you're actually there in person, which of course, you're not.
Want to find out what the problem is with hotel websites and booking services? Ready for a moan?
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 USA leads the world in terms of accessible hotels. That's the conclusion I've come to after several years spent travelling around with Stephen Hawking, the well-known disabled scientist (that's me on the left in the picture above.)
We've stayed in top and not-so-top hotels in cities all over the world, including in Hong Kong and China, Chile, Easter Island, the Virgin Islands, South Africa, Europe (Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Geneva, Padua, Amsterdam, London, Oxford) and the US (Pasadena, Santa Barbara, College Station, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington DC).
One thing stands out from all our hotel experiences - in the US it is considered absolutely normal to be disabled, and the right of a disabled person to access the same hotel facilities as everyone else is uncontested. It might be hard for non-US residents to appreciate just how little that principle holds elsewhere in the world.
