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

(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

This is an example of how an Accessible.travel city map may look. This map is of accommodation providers in San Francisco that have facilities for people with disabilities. Have a play around with it, move around it, zoom in and out, there are almost 40 properties on the map.
View Larger Map

The above map is a very simplistic idea of what can be achieved. The wheelchair symbols indicate that the accommodation has at least one room with facilities for people with disabilities that has a roll-in-shower, while the standing figure indicates that the hotel only has a bath. This allows the user to only look at the hotels that maybe suitable for their needs. Most people with disabilities tend to prefer or require roll-in-showers as baths are not suitable for their needs. Therefore, rather than having to look through all of the hotel descriptions, this use of symbols can be very helpful.

Within the bubble as you click on the symbol, there is some basic information about the property, such as the address, how many rooms for people with disabilities there are and how many of these have roll-in-showers. I have placed the link of Accessible.travel at the end, but on the actual web site it will say something like “more information” or “hotel assessment” and take the user through to a complete description of the property with photos.

As the web site grow, these maps can also be used more interactively through people with disabilities emailing in reviews of museums, restaurants, attractions and general photos of their trip to the city which can be added to it. This will help create a ownership and also give other people with disabilities confidence in the information given.

Assessment information provided by: Access Nothern California