What Accessible Should Mean When You Book a Room
Step-free is the beginning, not the standard. The specific questions worth asking any hotel, and the answers we think you should expect to get back.
The Word Does Too Much Work
Accessible appears on booking pages as a single checkbox covering wildly different realities: a room with a grab rail, a room with a wet-room shower, a room with a ceiling hoist. Because the label is one word, guests arrive to find a room that meets a regulation and not their needs. The fix is to ask in specifics.
The Questions That Actually Matter
Door width in centimetres. Whether the bathroom is a wet room or has a lip at the threshold. Bed height from the floor. Turning circle beside the bed. Whether the route from the entrance to the room involves a single step anywhere, including the lift threshold. Any hotel that cannot answer these from memory has not audited its own rooms.
What We Have
Four rooms with eighty-five centimetre doorways throughout, level-access wet rooms with fold-down seats and transfer space on both sides, beds at forty-eight centimetres, and a step-free route from the street to the room that does not pass through the restaurant. Two of them connect to a standard room for anyone travelling with a companion or carer.
Beyond Mobility
Accessibility is not only a wheelchair question. We hold vibrating pillow alarms and visual fire alerts, our menus exist in large print and in plain digital text that works with a screen reader, and the front desk has an induction loop. Assistance dogs are welcome everywhere in the building, including the restaurant.
Book by Message If It Helps
Our booking form cannot capture nuance, and it should not have to. Write to us and describe the requirement in your own words. We will match you to the right room, confirm the details back to you in writing, and hold that information for future stays so you never have to explain it twice.
Tell Us When We Get It Wrong
We would far rather hear about a rail in the wrong place than have a guest quietly decide not to return. Every access complaint reaches the general manager directly, and the last three changes we made to these rooms came from guests describing exactly what did not work.