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	TX: 04.09.09 - Hotel Rooms for Disabled PRESENTER: PETER WHITE

	Downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE 麻豆约拍 CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. WHITE Now in America recently a couple of disabled women began a legal action against the travel accommodation website hotels.com. Their grievance was that the company didn't allow customers to reserve a room with special disability features and adaptations. Customers could request such a room but still with the risk that all the so-called accessible rooms had been taken on arrival. Well hotels.com has now changed its policy and its sister company - expedia.com - has followed suit. Their staff will work more closely with hoteliers to try to ensure an accessible room is allocated to the customer at the time of booking. Well the American version of the website has already changed and the British version will follow soon - we're told. Well earlier I spoke to the 麻豆约拍 Security Correspondent Frank Gardner, wheelchair user Frank Gardner, who's had to book plenty of hotel rooms in his time and I began by asking him what difference had he noticed since he'd become disabled. GARDNER Well it's completely different, the two experiences. Before my injuries you could just go on line and book things up at the last minute and of course you got a huge choice. Post injury, because I'm now based in a wheelchair, it's a far more difficult undertaking and it means that you can't really book things online because you need to actually speak to a human being and say look, I've got a wheelchair, it's x number of centimetres wide, do you have something on the ground floor or have you got a lift etc. Usually the questions that you need to ask in most cases are not there on an online page. WHITE So I mean you have tried it online have you? GARDNER Oh yeah I have, yeah. My wife and I usually do. We've just been in Italy, for example, and what we had to do was research online, have a look at the photographs and think well is that going to be suitable, it probably is, then we had to follow it up with e-mails and phone calls. So you've got to have that interaction. WHITE And what about in Britain, I mean how available do you find the kind of rooms that you need? GARDNER Not very to be honest. I've recently done a book tour and in two occasions we stayed - had to stay in really horrible, ghastly places that were just hideous because they were wheelchair accessible. The far nicer places that we'd have rather stayed in were just not accessible to a wheelchair user. WHITE You say you have to do it to get what you want in turn by talking people, I mean does that tend to work, and presumably that is quite time consuming as well? GARDNER It's very time consuming because you often can't get hold of them or you get voicemail or there's a message saying they'll call you back and they don't and when they do you're driving and so on and so it's just - it makes the whole process of booking a hotel far more cumbersome. One thing that we did do recently, we went to Scotland for New Year, we wanted a place for about three nights over hogmanay and so we kind of sub-contracted our enquiry to the Scottish Tourist Board in London who were brilliant and they found this cracking place near Loch Ness - but that's rare. WHITE Frank Gardner. Well listening to that Jenifer Littman who's chief executive of Tourism for All which campaigns to improve disabled access, she's on the line from Taunton. Jenifer, how typical is the kind of inconvenience that Frank Gardner described? LITTMAN I'm afraid to say it's fairly typical. We are a charity that has provided an information service for disabled people seeking places to stay and we have to find it often for them because it is so difficult to find on your own. WHITE And you would accept this point, would you, that was made in the States that it's difficult to actually reserve an adapted room? LITTMAN That's been a particular complaint that we've had often. And it appears it goes in as a request rather than as a guarantee which clearly is no good to the person who's making what they think is a booking. So we very much welcome this development in the States. WHITE Well also with me is Carleigh Chadwick, who's accessibility manager for the UK and Ireland at IHG, that's the Intercontinental Hotel Group, including Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza. So can you book rooms online in your hotel - accessible rooms? CHADWICK Yes absolutely you can. I think it's very important for us to welcome all guests whether they have a disability or not and obviously the booking process is a very important part of that. So in the same way that a person might book a standard room or a suite it is possible for them to book an accessible room type. WHITE And that is a booking, it's not just a polite request, it's a reservation? CHADWICK It is a booking, it blocks a room at the hotel so that the guest can be assured a room will be available for them, an accessible room that is, when they arrive at the hotel. WHITE So if your company can do it why can't others? CHADWICK I can't comment on others but I can say that we have - we are fortunate to have what is one of the leading global hotel booking systems and we've adapted that and upgraded it to offer that facility to guests with disabilities. WHITE Jenifer, what about this issue of missing out on the cheaper offers? LITTMAN Well that's clearly a problem when you can't access reliable information on the internet because you can't just click and say yes I'll take up that offer and a number of offers are made as web only offers. We actually operate offers, including some from Carleigh in fact, made specifically for our users who have needs for accessible rooms ourselves, which are available online and directly from us but that's only the sort of one offs. And we are campaigning quite widely to get more information available both on mainstream websites so that the hotel groups have access statements and have more information that can be looked up, I mean that's one of the advantages of the internet is you can put a lot of information on there. WHITE Can I just ask Carleigh, very quickly, how can people catch up basically and I need a brief-ish answer to this? CHADWICK In terms of hotels making the - I think the advancements that we're seeing with hotels.com will hopefully help to improve that and we certainly at IHG are able to offer our lowest internet rate to people wishing to book accessible rooms online. WHITE Okay, Carleigh Chadwick, Jenifer Littman - thank you both very much indeed. Back to the Transcripts homepage Back to the You and Yours homepage The 麻豆约拍 is not responsible for external websites

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