This is part of a 5-part series on evolution of ADA and the disability experience from the perspective of a woman in the first generation of recognized disability rights. Click here to read the previous segment.
My Mom’s family isn’t local so we have always traveled a lot. In the early days of ADA it was nearly impossible to find an accessible hotel, but thankfully, I was small and strong enough to manage in a typical room. As I grew, progress in the hotel industry slowly followed.
These days I can usually get a room to meet my needs. All major name hotels have wheelchair accessible rooms, and some have one or two with a roll-in shower, but there are still a lot of hoops to jump through to get into one of those rooms. Every chain has a different method of booking, so I have to play super-sleuth to find the right rooms and generally spend a lot of time on hold trying to reach a person who can reserve the specific room that I need.
And then I get to the hotel and pray that the room reservation is correct, because it might well not be. Despite making the selection on the website, calling to have the room manually booked, and confirming a week or two prior, it is entirely possible that the one accessible room that I need will have been assigned to another guest.
This has happened too many times to count. But, hey, remember my grandfather who didn’t believe in the ADA? When one of these room errors happened during a family trip in 2017, he wouldn’t stop lecturing the manager about the violations of ADA, about how they were discriminating with their poorly run reservation system. To him, being able to get around a hotel room is no longer a frivolous luxury, it’s a basic right. Because times and attitudes are changing.