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Tag: Wheelchair Accessible Hotels View All Tags

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Inclusive Design: Makaranga Lodge Leads the Way

Go To The Hotel's Web Site Where: 1a Igwababa Rd, Kloof, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, 3610

| February 11, 2009 at 4:46 PM | 1 Comment

There’s a new wave trend in the hotel world. It’s quite a small wave currently – more of a ripple in the distance – but it’s set to become a veritable tsunami.

It’s called Inclusive Design, and its pioneers are those who believe hotels should welcome all guests equally, regardless of any disability they might have.

Inclusive Design – or Universal Design – is an ocean apart from the wave of "design hotels" that appear on the scene of any tourist mecca. Their "design" stops short at pretty colours and shiny gadgets. How many of you have shelled out a lot of cash to stay in a design hotel, then found that you can’t reach the plug sockets, that you can’t find the switches for the funny luminescent lights, that the shiny bathroom gets a soaking from the shower’s hydromassage jets or that you can’t attract the staff’s attention away from the mirror for long enough to book a taxi?

No, Inclusive Design aims to please everybody.

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Wheelchair Accessible Hotels :: Scandic Hotels Do It Best

| May 16, 2008 at 2:30 PM | 0 Comments

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.

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Wheelchair Accessible Hotels :: Fully Accessible Hotels

| May 15, 2008 at 4:40 PM | 2 Comments

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.

A room at the Access Centre Hotel Marmaris in Turkey.So, you're disabled and planning a holiday. Given all the nightmare involved in finding a reliable, accessible hotel, aren't you tempted to go for specially designed and designated accessible hotel?

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.

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Wheelchair Accessible Hotels :: To Websites and Hotel Booking

| May 14, 2008 at 1:27 PM | 1 Comment

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?

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Wheelchair Accessible Hotels :: The U.S. Leads the Way

| May 13, 2008 at 10:17 AM | 1 Comment

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.

Stephen Hawking and his lovely assistants at the Ritz-Carlton Orlando, Grande Lakes.

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.

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Do You Have Wheelchair Access?

| May 12, 2008 at 10:28 AM | 1 Comment

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.

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