Isn’t booking a hotel a dream nowadays! You just go online to one of the hotel agency websites, enter the place where you want to stay and enter your proposed arrival and leaving dates. You then get a list of hotels in that area with vacancies on your intended dates, and lists of available rooms with prices. And you make your choice. A doddle, isn’t it!
Well, perhaps if you just want a bog-standard room. Not if there is a disabled person involved. Rooms with disabled facilities do not seem to feature on these agency sites.
You can try putting something like “hotels with disabled facilities” into a search engine. This usually brings you up to a special web page on one of those same agency websites - a page telling you how marvellous many of its hotels are nowadays with extensive facilities for the disabled - as indeed many hotels are. But when it comes to searching it is back to the same standard system which seems to give no choice of disabled-friendly rooms.
So it is back to the old-fashioned way - phoning round some hotels.
So where do you find these hotels and their phone numbers? Don’t expect to get this from a web site without a bit of searching around. The expectation is that since you are on-line, you will book on-line and have no need to phone. When you do find a phone number it is likely to be a central reservations number at some location remote from the hotel.
When you do get as far as speaking to someone on the phone, beware of the “A” word (which I have avoided so far in this post).
It’s “Accessible”.
It is a popular jargon word overused by the media and society in general. It simply means that it offers some unspecified facility for the disabled. It may not get you what you want. Be more specific.
We recently needed to make two hotel reservations, one for a one-night stay in Bournemouth and one for three nights in Manchester. In each case we required a room with a walk-in shower for my wife.
We arrived at the Bournemouth hotel and were given the room key. The room did have wide doors and support rails alongside the WC. But the shower was just a fitting over the bath - not suitable for my wife, who can’t clamber into a bath to take a shower. We returned to reception (having used the room just for a quick change of clothing for an event that evening), and said we could not accept that room; could they provide a room with a walk-in shower? We were told the hotel did not have such rooms, so we said we were unable to stay. In fairness to the hotel, we were fully refunded without quibble. I said to the receptionist, “I’m sorry this has not worked out; there seems to have been some loss of communication about the type of room we needed.” The receptionist said that an accessible room had been requested. We left the evening event earlier than planned and drove home that night rather than face the hassle of trying to find a hotel with a walk-in shower on spec.
There lies the problem. Even if one is specific to the person one speaks to, the message is passed from person to person and becomes debased. So “walk-in” is translated to the less-specific “Accessible”, and the specific requirement is overlooked.
Fortunately in Manchester things worked better. We had stayed in the hotel previously and knew that walk-in showers were available. We actually got a wet room, with a well-designed sloping floor.
Central reservations can be helpful in some circumstances, but it would be so nice if one could have the option to speak to a real person at reception at the actual hotel; these people know best what is going on. As it is, if we have a specific question we are put on hold while central reservations makes an enquiry - and then there is lack of certainty whether messages have been passed back and forth correctly.
How can one find hotels and their local phone numbers in a particular area? Yellowpages.com is very good for smaller hotels and businesses, because it works by phone numbers, not websites, but it sometimes misses larger hotels which advertise no local numbers, only central reservations numbers. Even if you do find a telephone number which is obviously local, there is no guarantee you will speak to local reception. Select the option for reservations and you may be connected to a central reservations service without knowing, even if the name of the local hotel is announced.
Altogether, booking a hotel for a disabled person is a bit of a time-consuming hassle and lacks certainty of getting something entirely suitable. My advice is be specific in requirements and avoid jargon like “Accessible”.
Does anyone else have any tips on how to select hotels with disabled-friendly rooms, or how to avoid dealing through the distant central reservations?