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.
As part of their big pledge for environmental purity by 2025, the European Scandic Hotels chain has just announced they're going to help the environment even more by stopping their use of bottled water.
In the future, if you want a drink of water in a Scandic Hotel, you'll be able to quench your thirst using tap water that will be chilled and filtered as it comes through the faucet. Scandic says their filtering process will leave in the good minerals and take out any nasty chemicals, and you'll be able to choose from still or carbonated.
The move will save about 160 tons in carbon emissions a year, both by saving in the use of plastic bottles and through the transport costs usually needed to get the bottles to all the hotels. Those Scandinavians seem to have a heap of good ideas about being green, so we'll keep following Scandic on their quest for "environmental purity".
Scandinavians seem to be renowned for a bit of a social conscience and the Scandic Hotels chain has long had a reputation for doing things green.
In the last decade or so, Scandic has already done a lot to be environmentally friendly across their 140 hotels: introducing recycling bins into guest rooms, replacing chlorine bleach with oxygen bleach in the laundry, and renovating rooms with recyclable and renewable materials.
Last week Scandic made a very big promise: their goal is to be "100% green by 2025", which means eliminating all carbon-emitting activities and basically being super, super-environmental, including:
thermo steered heating, usage of renewed energy, cars driven by renewed fuel, water efficient water taps, showers and toilets, KRAV-labelled food (eco labelled), garbage sorters in 23 000 hotel rooms, switch to electricity from waterpower plants and no use of disposable packages.
Wow. Perhaps Scandic's services could be even more environmentally responsible if they just gave us sleeping bags and tents to stay in?
The whole sad process began with a complaint by a guest who had found a Bible in a drawer in his hotel room. He wrote to Mona Andersson, the head marketing executive at Scandic hotels. She wrote back [my translation]:
"Thank you for your e-mail and your views. Yes, we have traditionally had the Bible/New testament available at our hotel rooms. But all religions are welcome at Scandic so as of today we encourage all our hotels to remove the Bible from their rooms. The Bible will be available at the reception as a service for our guests.
All 130 Scandic hotels in ten countries such as Denmark, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Germany, The Netherlands and Norway will pull the bibles from their rooms.
We're guessing this ain't gonna happen at Marriott anytime soon. But never fear, your very own handheld bible trivia game is here!
