After my blog post yesterday about the launch of accessible.travel Cape Town I am even slightly surprised myself to be able to announce the launch of accessible.travel Melbourne today!

We still have some work to do on both destination pages such as add maps and bathroom sketches but the basic information regarding a few hotels is there. Thanks to our collaborator Bill Forrester, Director of Travability and our web designer, Quim Mañas Marsiñach, of cmpst, for all their hard work.

Below: Melbourne, provided by Bill Forrester through the accessible.travel Community.

With the amazing help of Monica Guy here on the accessible.travel Community and the owner of Accessible Cape Town, we have been able to launch the accessible.travel Cape Town destination page. There’s still a lot of work for us to do in South Africa and a lot of information to collect, but now we have four hotels for you to choose from with varying levels of facilities for people with disabilities.

Below: accessible.travel Community member Scott Rains on Safari in South Africa earlier this month.

Brussels will also be launched as a destination accessible.travel early next week with another 5 hotels to choose from. Another member of the accessible.travel Community, Bill Forrester, has been collecting hotel data and information with us in Melbourne and all of this has just been sent to the accessible.travel designer to be published.

Ian Chill has also been sending us some great information about accessible hotels in Cairns as well as posting information in the accessible.travel Community Cairns Group. I’ll announce when Cairns is available with instant hotel booking here on the blog as soon as it’s ready. Another collaborator with the accessible.travel project is Hartmut Smikac and will be helping us collect information in Germany, Austria and Hungary. Again in Europe, Luis Varela from Accessible Portugal has agreed to work with us, this time in Portuguese capital, Lisbon. Luis is the latest person to agree to work with us and I’m really looking forward to working with him further.

Hartmut has also translated our audit forms into German and Loretta Jaumandreu has translated them into Spanish making it easier for us to work with local people with disabilities at destinations that speak these languages.

If you would like to get more involved with the accessible.travel project and help us collect information about hotels, attractions, museums, bars, restaurants, nightclubs and transport where you live and earn commissions for the work you do, please contact me through my profile.

Craig

I am pleased to announce a new partnership between accessible.travel and tripwolf to support each other in our work.

Tripwolf is a social travel guide for the discerning traveler that combines professional editorial travel content with user generated content – a collection of experiences from thousands of travelers worldwide. With tripwolf, travelers can generate their own customized 10-20 page travel guide based on their individual preferences and recommendations from friends and “trip gurus.”

I have been involved with tripwolf since their launch and have always tried to provide information for travellers with disabilities on their site. I am thrilled that they are suppporting accessible.travel in order to be able to provide their own community users with useful information about travelling with a disability.

We hope to be able to cross reference the hotels that both sites use so that tripwolf users with disabilities can find reliable information about accommodation with facilities for people with disabilities and make reservations with us.

Thanks to tripwolf for their continued support and everyone involved in accessible.travel is very excited about this new partnership.

The European Network for Accessible Toursim (ENAT) talk about accessible.travel in a blog post today. ENAT have been very supportive of accessible.travel and have shared access data for various destinations.

Without ENAT accessible.travel wouldn’t have got to this point so quickly and I look forward to working with them more in the future. I’ll keep you all posted through the blog about developments with ENAT, of which, I am hoping that there will be many in the not too distant future.

(photo provided by Jani Nayar from SATH)

One of the key destinations for accessible.travel in the US will be New York. Unfortunately for us and for people with disabilities there isn’t very much information out there on the world wide web. Just trying to find a hotel with the right facilities is an absolute nightmare, I went to NYC in July last year and ticked the “wheelchair friendly” search box on a well known booking engine. This was a big mistake and I should have known better, I did email the hotel to confirm the access but they never replied and it would have been very expensive to call the hotel from Nicaragua, so I never did.

I arrived at the hotel at about midnight to be confronted with 6 steps and no alternative entrance. The situation got worse when I realised that the lift was so narrow that my wheelchair wouldn’t go through the doors and they had put me in a room on the fifth floor. All of the ground floor rooms were fully occupied but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway as the bathroom doors were so narrow that I couldn’t get in there either. They ended up putting me in another of their hotels that only had three steps to get into it and a lift that was wide enough for my chair. The hotel didn’t offer me any type of compensation, they didn’t even offer to pay for a taxi to the new hotel. It was only through the generosity of a French backpacker that I managed to get to the new hotel as he carried my rucksack and showed me the way. The service was appalling and the staff were rude, definitely not “wheelchair friendly” nor friendly towards anyone from what I could gather with the arguments from unhappy clients at the front desk.

This is the type of situation that accessible.travel wants to make a thing of the past through providing detailed hotel assessments and photos, so that individuals can make their own decisions as to whether a hotel is suitable for their needs or not.

With this in mind accessible.travel are trying to raise the funding so that I can go on a two week trip there to assess hotels, attractions,  transport facilities, bars and restaurants and are looking for businesses that maybe interested in sponsoring the accessible.travel New York pages.

What we require:

• Return flights to NYC from Central America
• Accessible accommodation at a central NYC location.
• Transport costs.
• Budget for daily sustenance.

I return accessible.travel will supply:

• Company logo with hyperlink to their web site on all New York destination pages.
• Company profile and hyperlink to their web site in the partners page.
• Company logo with hyperlink to their web site in the New York Group of the accessible.travel Community.
• Coverage of the partnership on the accessible.travel Blog.
• Supply of New York data on the company web site if desired with links to the accessible.travel Booking Engine, with payable commissions (subject to agreement of terms and conditions).

The total budget required for the sponsorship deal is $3,000 for all the above benefits.

accessible.travel are especially interested in researching New York at the moment but would also be interested in hearing from any companies that would like to sponsor a different city destination (US or elsewhere). The same offer would apply, for more information please contact me: craig@accessible.travel

Today my brother, Andrew, that works with me in Barcelona at accessible.travel went out and did a hotel assessment. Not only was the assessment itself really well done (although the hotel wasn’t as accessible as we would have hoped), he drew the perfect bathroom sketch and I just wanted to share it with you all!

I think we’ll be giving Andrew the job of drawing the bathrooms plans for accessible.travel as he does them much better than I do. The above picture is a little small, but on the actual accessible.travel site you will be able to see the detail much more clearly.

Update: You can now see the full review with photos and the bathroom sketch on accessible.travel

Another example of how information may be displayed on the accessible.travel booking engine, this time with a general description/introduction to the hotel. Unfortunately, at the time of publication we do not have access to photos of the adaptations at this hotel, we are working to correct this as soon as possible.

Scandic Byporten, Oslo
Jernbanetorget 6
0154, Oslo

Welcome to Scandic Byporten

Enjoy fjord views from the Scandic Byporten hotel, set in Oslo’s Central Station.

Great shopping and Oslo attractions are on the doorstep. Inside, find high-speed internet access in all rooms, as well as a business corner. Convene in one of two on site meeting rooms or keep fit in the gym, just 1 block away.

Oslo shopping is on your doorstep at the Scandic Byporten hotel – the hotel is in the same building as the Byporten Shopping Centre. Explore nearby Oslo attractions like Akershus Fortress or bustling Karl Johan Street. Sporty types will love Bogstad Golf Club, 13 miles away.

Information for People with Disabilities

Entrance for People with Disabilities:

Ramped or level access to main entrance: Yes

Door Width: 100cm

Type of door: Sliding automatic door

Lift:

Lift door width: 90cm

Lift depth: 136cm

Lift width: 156cm

Is there an audible signal for lift stops at each floor: Yes

Is there a hand-rail in the lift: Yes

Guest Rooms with Facilities for People with Disabilities:

Door width: 87cm

Type of beds available: Double.

Height of bed: 58cm

Clear space under bed: 30cm

Light switch next to bed: Yes

The furniture in the bedroom cannot be rearranged

En-suite Bathroom:

Door type: Door opens inwards

Door width: 88cm

Bathing Facilities:

Roll in shower: Yes

Shower door width: 73cm

Dimensions of shower: 98cm x 179cm

Wall mounted shower seat provided: No (a free standing seat is available)

Shower handrails height: 100cm

Shower handrail length: 30cm

WC:

WC height: 48cm

Facing toilet, clear space on left side is: 35 cm.

Facing toilet, clear space on right side is: 125 cm.

Clear space in front of WC: 200cm

WC handrail length (drop down): 70cm

WC handrail height: 65cm

Sink:

Sink height: 85cm

Clear space under sink: 71cm

Clear width under sink: 178cm

Sink depth to back wall: 50cm

Other Details:

Public alarm system with: visual alarm signal, vibrating pad and auditory signal (bell / siren)

You can reserve this hotel through accessible.travel

Quite possibly the most important part of setting up a travel site for people with disabilities is providing the correct information regarding accommodation facilities and displaying it in a clear manor. On my blog Accessible Everything I have been playing with ideas of how to show hotel information and have also looked at various other web pages that give information in different ways and different levels of detail.

One of the conclusions that I have drawn is that either not enough information is supplied or there is far too much information which could potentially mislead or confuse a potential customer. Another problem that I have noted is that some sites provide so many symbols and icons that it’s hard to remember exactly what they mean.

Below is an example of what an accessible.travel hotel description may look like:

Red Roof Inn Miami Airport,

3401 NW LeJeune Road,

Miami, FL.

Main Entrance:

Ramped or level access to main entrance: Yes

Door Width: 84cm (Double doors = 168cm total door width)

Type of door: Manual pull doors.

Access to public areas:

There is level or ramped access to all public areas of the hotel including the swimming pool, parking and dining areas.

Lift:

There are a total of 3 lifts at the hotel.

Lift door width: 100cm

Lift depth: 141cm

Lift width: 203cm

Are there raised numbers or letters on the lift buttons: Yes (braille)

Is there a verbal announcement at each floor: No

Is there a display indicating which floor the lift is at: Yes

Guest Rooms with Facilities for People with Disabilities:

How many rooms are available for guests that use a wheelchair: 8 in total, 4 with roll in showers, 4 with baths (only 1 room with a roll in shower was assessed for the purpose of this assessment, room 246)

Door width: 84cm

Type of beds available: Double King Size.

Height of bed: 58cm

Clear space under bed: 18cm

Light switch next to bed: Yes

Height of desk: 77cm

Clear space under desk: 75cm

This room also has an inter-connecting door to the next room.

En-suite Bathroom:

Door type: Door opens outwards

Door width: 89cm

Bathing Facilities:

Roll in shower: Yes (wet floor throughout)

Dimensions of shower: 97cm x 150cm (see floor plan)

Wall mounted shower seat provided: No (a free standing seat is available from reception upon request)

Shower handrails: Yes, mounted at a height of 80cm and 84cm

WC:

WC height: 46cm

Clear space beside WC: +100cm

Clear space in front of WC: +100cm

WC handrails: Yes, mounted at a height of 90cm

Sink:

Sink height: 83cm

Clear space under sink: 75cm

Sink length: 50cm

Sink depth: 46cm

Other Bathroom Details:

Is there an emergency call system: No

The bathroom has a tilted mirror above the sink for the use of wheelchair users. It also has a flashing alarm for people with hearing impairments in the bathroom should the hotel need to be evacuated.

Other Information for Guests with Disabilities:

• Signs throughout the hotel have braille for people with visual impairments.
• Smoking and non-smoking rooms are available.
• The hotel airport shuttle service is not currently suitable for wheelchair users.

You can reserve this hotel with accessible.travel