Four Tips for Booking Accessible Hotel Rooms

For wheelchair and scooter users, the details of booking a hotel stay can seem overwhelming. In addition to navigating rooms, hallways and elevators, there are other factors to consider before you make your reservation. Here are four tips for ensuring a comfortable hotel experience:

  • Start off with a general booking site. Start your search on a site like Expedia, which will search for a variety of hotels at once. These sites allow you to refine your search by certain criteria like accessibility. Once you’ve narrowed your search, it’s time to dig a little deeper. Or if you are traveling to popular tourism areas such as Boston, New York City, Las Vegas or Orlando, AcessibleGO has done some of this work for you providing accessibility-specific travel info and resources.
  • Go to the hotel’s website. Once you’ve found a few potential hotels, visit their websites. Sometimes “accessible” doesn’t always mean that it will fit your needs. There may be more information on accessibility specifics that can help you make a more informed decision on where to stay.
  • Call the hotel. Speaking with a representative that is physically located at the property may be the best way to gain details about what to expect during your stay. By making a phone call you can ask specific questions and have a conversation about your concerns.  If there are outstanding questions, a representative can find the answer more efficiently than finding the answer online.
  • Check with others. Check out the online reviews for the hotel. There may be helpful information contained within about the accessibility of the hotel. Other wheelchair users could have stayed at that hotel and may have provided the accessibility information that you wanted to know.

At MobilityWorks, we know that planning travel and coordinating hotels when you are in a wheelchair can be difficult, but we don’t want it to be. We hope these tips have provided you with some great ways to make your travel experience better. For more tips and resources, check out our other blog posts.