I was sitting in a hotel restaurant in Cheshire a while back: one of those rambling country manors, full of mock Jacobean wood panelling and fake Tiffany lamps, beloved of football-and-property enriched couples with gravy hued fake tans, sports cars parked outside and more signet rings than GCSEs.
I was hungry and alone, aside from, as always, travelling with my own disability in the form of severe visual impairment, aka ocular albinism and nystagmus – or the Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow of very bad eyesight, as I prefer to call it. I’d asked in advance for an accessible room which, predictably, was ‘not yet ready’ for me to check into when I arrived. I presumed this was due to one of the chambermaids knocking herself unconscious on the grip bars positioned to the side of the en suite disabled toilet.
My disability had been noted by the staff. No. Let me try that again. My disability had been supinely absorbed by the staff and then put in a high-speed spin-dryer marked ‘confusion’.
I asked a bovine-looking waiter for a menu. He stumbled off, returning quarter of an hour later with a piece of cardboard which had a cartoon rabbit on it. ‘We thought that the menu is in print that would be too small for you to read. We’re just getting a large print copy sorted for you – but do you want to choose something from the children’s menu in the meantime?’
Did I garrote him? Did I start emptying kegs of kerosene around the lobby? No. I did nothing other than order a cheese toastie and feel more alone than at any point since being stranded at Inverness train station during a blizzard.
Hotels in the UK are very good these days at showing off how accessible they are. In reality, this usually means that they have put in the same amount of legally-mandated effort that prisons do. Just as HMP Belmarsh almost certainly has one ‘accessible’ cell, so a hotel will have one room dedicated to those with additional needs.
In both the slammer and the spa hotel, this room will always be on the ground floor and, while other guests/inmates will be treated like adults, the occupier of the disability cell/room will be treated by the staff like a leaking bag of Semtex with the IQ of a ceiling hoist – which, ironically, is also something that the institution/guest house will only have one of.
Hotels shouldn’t be like this for disabled guests. Some of them aren’t. But not nearly enough, even in London, a city I spend at least half my time in when I’m not travelling for newspapers and magazines.
‘We’re just getting a large print copy sorted for you – but do you want to choose something from the children’s menu in the meantime?’
If hotels need to learn one thing about how to treat guests with additional needs it is this: sycophantic gratitude for making a stay tolerable, or even pleasurable, is not in a disabled guest’s everyday user manual. Just as you wouldn’t expect an able-bodied guest to leave a £100 tip because they didn’t contract botulism in the restaurant, so you can’t expect guests with disabilities to drench the staff with gushing homilies because they can get in and out of the shower.
And yet hotels persist with their neediness. So often, when I check in as a disabled guest, a back-office member of the bookings team will emerge, complete with rictus grin and dripping with faux-philanthropic zeal. He or she will lean towards me and state, sotto voce, that they hope I will ‘especially’ enjoy my stay and that they’ve ‘made sure’ my room is equipped with ‘everything’ I need.
‘Well,’ I retort in my fantasies, ‘you have given me everything I need so far, except the recognition that I’m not a project for your Hotel Management BTEC. I’m just another human being giving you money to use one of your beds.’ I never do this, of course. I’m British. So I smile and think about machine weaponry for a bit.
Hotels must stop this forelock-tugging need for disabled guest approval. Because the whole point of ‘accommodate’ (which stems from the Latin accommodare, meaning ‘suitable, fit’) is that the contract should be a silent, ineffable one. The money I’ve handed over should be enough of a reward. I don’t want to engage in Gestalt therapy to make the staff feel virtuous about something they’re legally obliged to do anyway.
It needs to be baked into a property’s DNA to treat all guests as trusted, adult collaborators in the hotel concept: that simple yet still captivating notion of paying money to eat a meal then fall asleep in somewhere that isn’t your home but makes you feel, before you’ve even entered the lobby, that you’d rather like it to be.
And please, save the children’s menu for the under-tens. I’m really not in the mood for fish fingers.
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