Travellers World

Travelling with a wheelchair — the good, the bad and the not-a-chance

Tag: accessibility

  • “Accessible” is not a yes or no answer

    When we started writing places up, we tried a star rating. Five stars for accessible, one star for not. We gave up on it within a month, because it was useless.

    A museum with a perfect step-free entrance, a lift to every floor, and no accessible toilet in the building is not a three-star experience. It is a place you can visit for ninety minutes and then have to leave. A hotel with a magnificent accessible bathroom and two steps at the front door is not four out of five. It is zero, because you cannot get to the bathroom.

    Access is not a score out of five. It is a chain, and it is only as strong as the weakest link in it.

    So we do two things instead

    First, a blunt overall verdict, in plain words:

    • Good access — we got around without a fight.
    • Mixed — doable, but with caveats you want to know about first.
    • Poor access — hard work. Only with help and planning.
    • Not accessible — we could not get in, or could not use it.

    Second, a checklist, because the verdict alone does not tell you whether the specific thing you need is there. We check the step-free entrance, doorway widths, lifts, the accessible toilet, the accessible room and bathroom, blue badge parking, getting there at all, and whether the staff knew what they were doing.

    Why “staff knew what they were doing” is on the list

    Because it is the single most reliable predictor of how a day goes, and it appears on almost nobody else’s checklist.

    Good architecture with bad staff is a bad day: the ramp exists but nobody knows where the key is. Mediocre architecture with good staff is often a fine day, because someone competent finds a way round the problem before you have to ask. We would rather go somewhere slightly awkward with people who have thought about it than somewhere beautifully built by people who have not.

    What our ratings are not

    They are not an audit. We are not access consultants and we do not arrive with a tape measure. They are a record of what two people found on one particular day, with one particular wheelchair and one particular set of needs.

    Access also changes. Buildings get refurbished, good managers move on, the accessible toilet becomes a store cupboard. So please treat everything here as a strong starting point and a list of questions to ask — not as a guarantee. Check before you travel. We do too.

  • What good staff do differently

    We have been helped by hundreds of people over the years — on platforms, at gates, in hotel lobbies, at the bottom of unexpected flights of stairs. Almost all of them meant well. A smaller number were genuinely good at it, and the difference between meaning well and being good at it is enormous.

    Here is what the good ones do. It is a short list, and none of it is difficult.

    They talk to Bev

    Not to Steve, about Bev, while Bev is sitting right there. This is the one that comes up most and it is the easiest to fix. If the question is about the person in the chair, ask the person in the chair.

    They ask before they touch the chair

    A wheelchair is not a piece of furniture in a corridor. It is part of somebody’s personal space. Grabbing the handles and setting off is startling at best and frightening at worst. “Would you like a push?” takes two seconds.

    They say what they do not know

    “I’m not sure, let me find out” is a brilliant answer. “Yes, it’s fully accessible” from someone who has never looked is how you end up stuck. We would far rather wait three minutes for a real answer than act on a confident wrong one.

    They know where the equipment is

    The ramp, the key, the lift override, the person who is trained on the stairlift. Good venues make sure more than one person on each shift knows. Bad venues have one man called Dave, and Dave is on his break.

    They do not make it a performance

    Loud announcements, a small crowd, a lot of fuss about how marvellous everyone is being. We appreciate the help enormously. We would just like to receive it the way anyone else receives a service — quietly, competently, and without becoming the entertainment.

    They follow through

    The single best thing anybody ever does for us is the boring bit at the end: radioing ahead, ringing the next station, telling the restaurant we are coming, writing it in the book. The help that arrives is good. The help that is arranged for the next stage of the journey is what makes a trip work.

    If you work somewhere the public visits and you have read this far — thank you. That list is genuinely all of it.

  • The questions we ask before we book a hotel

    “Is the hotel accessible?” is the worst question you can ask, because the answer is always yes. Everybody says yes. The receptionist says yes, the booking site says yes, the little wheelchair icon says yes. Then you arrive and there are three steps up to the front door and a bathroom you could not turn a shopping trolley in.

    So we stopped asking it. Now we ask specific questions that cannot be answered with a cheerful yes, and we ask them on the phone, not by email, because you learn as much from the pause before the answer as you do from the answer.

    Getting in the building

    • How many steps are there between the car park and reception? (Not “is it step-free” — make them count.)
    • If there is a ramp, how steep is it, and is there a handrail?
    • Is the main entrance the accessible one, or is it round the back past the bins?
    • Is the front door automatic, or does someone have to hold it?

    The room

    • What is the clear width of the bedroom door, in centimetres?
    • Is there space to get a wheelchair down both sides of the bed, or just one?
    • How high is the bed from the floor?
    • Is the room on the ground floor? If not, how many lifts serve it, and what happens if the lift fails?

    The bathroom — where it usually falls apart

    This is the one that catches us out most often, so we ask the most here.

    • Is it a wet room with a level floor, or a shower tray with a lip?
    • Is there a fixed glass screen? (A screen can make a side transfer impossible even in a room that is otherwise fine.)
    • Is there a shower seat, is it fixed or free-standing, and which side is it on?
    • Which side of the toilet are the grab rails on? Left, right, or both?
    • Is there a red emergency cord, and does it reach the floor?
    • Can you get a wheelchair under the sink?

    The question that tells you everything

    After all that, we ask one more: “Could you send me a photograph of the bathroom?”

    A hotel that is genuinely set up for disabled guests will have those photos to hand, or will happily walk down the corridor and take them. A hotel that hesitates, or says the photos are on the website (they are not), is telling you something. We have booked on the strength of a blurry phone picture of a grab rail more than once, and we have never regretted it.

    Your turn: if you have experiences of your own — the places that got it right, and the ones that got it badly wrong — tell us in the comments below. Every report helps the next traveller.