Disabled Room for Non-Disabled
OK, I have been trying to book a hotel room for a couple of nights in London in August because we have Olympics tckets (hooray!). Many places were already full (or claimed to be) or charging such inflated prices I ruled them out.
One hotel had a few rooms left, at OK (if not cheap) prices, but they were designated as 'disabled rooms'. Nothing on the website asked you to specify anything about disability so we have booked one of these, even though neither of us is disabled.
Does anyone see any problems with doing this ? There were other rooms of this type still available, so I don't feel I have 'stolen' the room from a disabled guest. But will the staff expect us to have a disability of some kind ??
Thoughts welcome!
One hotel had a few rooms left, at OK (if not cheap) prices, but they were designated as 'disabled rooms'. Nothing on the website asked you to specify anything about disability so we have booked one of these, even though neither of us is disabled.
Does anyone see any problems with doing this ? There were other rooms of this type still available, so I don't feel I have 'stolen' the room from a disabled guest. But will the staff expect us to have a disability of some kind ??
Thoughts welcome!
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Comments
If you are feeling bad/worried about it, you could ring the hotel (or, to preserve the booking just in case you do not get the answer you are looking for, a different hotel) and ask them the general policy...?
No, they wouldn't.
Wouldn't that be breaking the law in regards to disability discrimination act?
No. They might be obliged to have rooms adapted for disabled people, or to allocate the rooms sensibly if they're dealing with booking requests simultaneously, but I can't think why they'd be obliged to renege on a non-disabled person's booking just because a disabled customer turns up later.
A few of our friends said that or something similar, and it's all in very bad taste! (Though we laughed.
I also book for disabled client's who do not use chairs and none have ever been asked to provide proof.
If I contact a hotel which has disabled rooms and find they are all booked I just look somewhere else. Its really up to the hotel's own policy whether they hang on to rooms or not.
You don't have to be disabled to book an adapted room. In fact you will probably be getting a lot more room for your money.
You have nothing to worry or feel guilty about.
Why would there be a problem. A disabled room is one that makes life a little more easy for a disabled person if they book in. If the rooms are free, a hotel is correct to put anybody in them. Its simple economics. Why leave rooms empty on the off chance they are wanted when others are looking for them.
The key word to consider in that Act is "discrimination." If a hotel is fully booked it is not discriminatory to turn away potential guests, be they disabled or not.
If there were empty rooms and a disabled person were turned away solely because they were disabled and the hotel had no facilities, that would be discriminatory.
Of course common sense would dictate that if there were empty rooms that became available, it would not be unreasonable to ask an able bodied guest who was booked into an accessible room to re-locate to another room to allow a disaabled guest to stay also.
That's a bold statement...can you point to any such legislation?
No, but breaking a contract in order to give the room to a disabled person, solely because they're disabled, might be. The Act forbids discrimination on the grounds of disability; it doesn't give scope for positive discrimination. Unless they've amended it since I last looked at it, of course.