My open letter to hotelmanagers around the world: You're losing money if you don't improve how you engage with guests with disabilities!

Dear hotel manager,

I just returned from a sixteen day holiday in Hawaii, where I celebrated Christmas and NYE, but mainly life. This was my first holiday since I became partly disabled about a year ago and it was eye opening.

For the past ten years I’ve been a frequent traveller (platinum status with three hotel chains and two airlines) and I appreciate a nice hotel as much as the next person. Never had I imagined traveling with a disability would be so different. Our Hawaiian adventure took us to three islands and eight different hotels, of which I booked seven through a third party. Admittedly so, that was the first mistake as this third party did not pass on my request for a wheelchair accessible room to any of the booked hotels. However, based on a one night experience a couple of months ago, I was wary they would anyway and thus called every hotel personally to make sure my request got in the system. All of them promised me it was no problem at all and would be taken care of.

Of the eight hotels, only one got it right and gave us the room we asked for: two beds and an ocean view (big shout-out to Castle Hilo Hawaiian). With the other hotels we faced one or more of the following issues:

• Our request for an accessible room never got passed on from central reservations to the actual hotel (this especially happened with the larger chains like the Sheraton)
• Oops, now there were no accessible rooms available anymore
• There was an accessible room available but not the one we booked. So no ocean view but parking lot view instead (garden view in the best case scenario).
• Yes, the hotel had an accessible room but only with one King bed. Most hotels seem to think that when you have a disability, you automatically travel with a partner. I’ve travelled the world a couple of times over with my best friend and we each like having our own bed (major kudos to ‘The Modern Honolulu’ who were really accommodating and provided us with a roll away bed, free of charge)
• The ‘accessible’ room turned out to be a room where they placed a shower chair in the tub, meaning you still have to step into the tub. That is not wheelchair accessible people!

What surprised me, maybe more than anything, is that friendly, though admittedly so, sometimes slightly emotional, feedback about the perceived situation was generally met with either one of two responses:

• Central reservations didn't pass on your request, it’s not our fault
• We’ve never heard this feedback before

Here's the thing; as your guest I don't really care how broken your communications process with your central offices is. I'm checking into a hotel that has the name of the hotel I talked to, so I'd love for you to take responsibility. With regards to the second one; when you tell a customer, who is giving feedback, that you never heard this feedback before, you are doing two things:

• Isolating the customer by implying they are the only one who have ever felt this way and as such are probably exaggerating/wrong.
• Making it the customer’s problem – you’ve never heard this before so it must be them and as such why would you change it.

We encountered one of the most flagrant examples of this at the Hilton in Phoenix, where we had a twelve hrs lay over on our way to Honolulu. The Hilton provides free shuttle service from the airport to the hotel and vice versa. This shuttle however is not wheelchair accessible. I had a wonderful friend pick us up in a, for this purpose, rented car to get us to the hotel. We had to get back to the airport the following morning, though, and so I asked hotel reception about the lack of accessibility for the shuttle. Their response? “Oh really? We’ve never had that feedback before”. When asked how other guests with disabilities managed this, one of their front desk staff was in a wheelchair, interestingly enough, we were told they didn’t have a lot of these, but when they did, these guests always had their own transportation. We ended up booking and paying for a taxi ourselves.

Having a disability sucks (pardon my language but any other, more polite, word would not quite convey how tough it is to not be fully able bodied) and the last thing you need is to have to make ten calls and wait for five hours to get a chair, stool, or basically anything to sit on in the shower so you too can, after a full day of travel, take that much desired shower (true story). I don't like using the phrase, but it's rather emotionally upsetting to have to go through all that for a basic need. The manager of the hotel in question eventually got this sorted but not after a very exasperated "we've just never had this feedback before so there's really nothing I can do with this".

That remark in itself surprises me, given that, as hotel managers, you are in the hospitality business and I would expect you to take all and any kind of feedback that can help you be more hospitable.

While I’m still fairly young, with the ageing ‘baby boom’ generation, there will be increasingly more guests with disabilities, needing accessible rooms. And guess what? They have money to spend and when they book an ‘ocean view’ room they don’t want to be put in a room at the back of the building with a view of the garbage trucks, just because that’s the one you decided to make ADA approved (disability accessible). It really isn’t that hard; just listen to your guests, treat them with respect and understand that, they too, have been saving hard for that ‘once in a lifetime’ trip and want the same experience as your other guests.

In my reviews on Tripadvisor and other review sites, I focused a lot on how ‘disability friendly’ each hotel was and I saw that come back in other reviews too. So the choice is yours; will you miss out on an entire group of guests or go the extra mile and be a preferred hotel for all those coming to stay?