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.
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.
"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.
This weekend's UK Times published a list of what it thinks are the coolest new hotels across Europe.
We're not sure how much faith we can put on this list, since it does include the Adam and Eve in Antalya, Turkey, home to the world's slowest and most stupid bar staff. It does, however, get a bit of credibility back by adding the Chedi Milan, which probably does warrant the label of one of Europe's coolest new hotels.
So we're thinking that perhaps the new-since-last-month Mystique on the paradise of Santorini, Greece, might also be okay:
Its 18 villas are carved into the cliff face, each overlooking the caldera, and every one flat-screened and hi-fi'd. There's locally quarried limestone on the floor, original art on the walls, cushions clad in antique textiles.
Yep, definitely cool. They also give a tip on the Hotel Fouquet's Barriere in Paris which we've already decided is cool, after it opened in November last year. Perhaps it's all a matter of opinion on what's cool, but we guess a list is at least a starting point.
You might want to choose the famous alps of Switzerland or Austria for your European ski holiday; or you might decide to opt for lesser-known Andorra, that small mountainous country squeezed between France and Spain. (One good reason to not only holiday there but to move there is that its residents have the highest life expectancy in the world!).
But let's get back to your ski holiday: the Hotel Ski Plaza Andorra is said to be one of the most convenient places to step outside onto your skis or snowboard every morning, and it's comfortable enough to take good care of the aching muscles at the other end of the day. It sits next to a supermarket, pharmacy and ski hire shop, and 100 meters from the Canillo ski lift--close enough for even the worst beginner ski shufflers to get there.
But what might be more important is what's inside: for example, the junior suites which all come with a hydro-massage bath. You can also spend evenings relaxing in the Pic Blanc Sports Bar with "soft music, table games, pool, darts, cocktail, coffee and bar services". And you can say you've holidayed in Andorra. Who else can say that?
When a travel agent is quoted in a newspaper saying, "April is the new June in Italy," you know European hotel prices have gotten out of hand...
Yesterday's Wall Street Journal ran a story called "Summer in Europe: Easy, but Not Cheap." (Online for subscribers only.) The main slant of it was that while lots of new air routes between the U.S. and Europe are opening up, summer flight prices are still above $1,000 a ticket and hotels are routinely clocking in at over $500 per night.
Besides that "April is the new June" quote, here are some more that will give you heartburn if you're planning a summer trip to Europe.
The average daily rate for a four-star hotel in London has skykrocketed to $213 for this summer, up 22 percent from $175 last year.
A single night at L'Andana, a Leading Small Hotels of the World property in Tuscany...starts at 535 euros ($702) in June.
A standard courtyard room at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park London (pictured here) with no meals or extras starts at 435 pounds ($840) per night over July 4. Hey, those bed bug eradications are expensive.
A single room booked at the Hotel Bristol in Vienna for the week of May 16 starts at 410 euros per night ($538).
The Journal's advice on how to deal with all this? Take a cruise or head to Croatia. In our opinion, there's always Couchsurfing.com.
