I didn’t stay in a hotel until I was almost an adult. My debut check-in was at a high-rise resort in Magaluf with three mates at the age of 17, and trust me, you really don’t want to know any more than that. My formative family vacations were mostly spent in static caravans; usually in France. For a fortnight, my parents would lounge around, eating buttered and fromaged baguettes and working their way through the stash of bottled petite bières they’d bought in Calais.
I spent the days frolicking in the camp site’s obligatory Kid’s Club (usually called ‘Junior Eurocamp’ or some such clunky epithet) where myself and a cluster of other children would cavort under the fabulously laissez-faire supervision of an, invariably Spanish, 18 or 19-year-old child-minder. She would spend her days sunbathing while we threw paint, crayons, footballs and tennis racquets at each other in a pre-Brexit spirit of pan-European Lord of the Flies-style bonding and squabbling.
The hotel grounds
One summer, aged around nine, I found out in the most painful way possible just how rubbish my visual impairment was gearing up to be. At that age, I was still coming to terms with the impact of having been born with albinism and nystagmus. This continues to make me almost completely blind in one eye and gives me roughly 30% or so of blurry, highly unreliable vision in the other. Despite my lusty engagement in all outdoor activities with friends from as early as I can remember, I wasn’t aware until this particular day just how much the act of diving into a goalpost that had a nail sticking out of it would hurt.
As the blood surged from my forehead and the frightened screams of my Euro-playmates seared my eardrums, I staggered away from my position as goalkeeper in this now hastily abandoned impromptu kickabout and alerted our child-minder Sammy to the situation. Rousing herself from her sunlounger, she hurtled off to find the camp medic who took one look at me, one look at Sammy and admonished her with the line, “he should never have been allowed out in the first place with his condition.”
Four decades later and I suspect this tyro male nurse would be appalled by my current career. Because, despite having a lifelong visual disability, I have ‘been allowed out’ for some time now; spending much of it as a journalist and being paid by newspapers, magazines and radio stations to travel the world. I cannot bear the clichés that are always in dire propinquity to differently abled travellers. ‘Breaking boundaries’, ‘not being held back’ and (worst of all) being ‘brave’ are lazy, patronising and wholly irrelevant. I travel for the same reasons as able-bodied people do and I don’t recall any non-disabled people ever telling me they’re off to Barcelona because they, ‘want to challenge stereotypes’. They go for the sun and seafood. And so do I.
The swimming pool at Four Seasons Hampshire
Elise Quiniou
Yet not everybody in the hospitality industry has caught onto this axiom. When I asked the bartender in one Cornish hotel if she could tell me what whiskies they stocked behind the counter she retorted by yelling, “O, you can read the labels yourself!” I was then forced to tell her about my disability. A free single malt and a lugubrious apology followed, but that’s hardly the point.
I prefer to use accessible rooms in hotels if possible; mainly because the layout means I’m infinitely less likely to walk into or trip over things. Accessible hotel rooms are, at least on paper, supposed to have a little more space and far fewer obstacles in the pathway between the door, bed and shower. Though interpretations of this are highly fluid. I recall being told by one Portuguese hotelier that their ‘accessible’ room had seven steps in it. How a wheelchair user would navigate this remains an enigma, unless there are now proto-levitating mobility vehicles in Lisbon that have yet to cross the Lusophone border.
Even the largest resort hotels seem to assume that the property will only ever need to accommodate a maximum of one disabled guest per evening. The token ‘accessible room’ invariably has a view overlooking the car park and will, absolutely always, be the last on the list for any refurbishing jobs that the owners might have in mind. My accessible room in one Florida hotel had a 1990 phone directory on the living room table. I wouldn’t have minded, but it was 2018 at the time of my visit.
The drapes in their rooms are thicker than Tony Soprano’s money clip
And while people with disabilities are disproportionately more likely to be at the bottom end of the economic spectrum, it does feel a little presumptuous to find that any accessible rooms are always in the lowest-spec, ‘best value’ range; as if the idea of a person with access needs also having a reasonable amount of money is an amalgam as unlikely as world peace or the opening of a decent restaurant in Leicester Square.
Despite all of the above, I continue to wander through the lobbies of myriad hotels each year in the course of my work. But something changed a few months ago. Perhaps it was turning 45. Maybe it was the vision in my ‘good’ eye deteriorating markedly. Perhaps it was just sheer bloody-mindedness. But I decided to make a hotel really work for me for a change. So I challenged the Four Seasons hotel in Hampshire to make themselves full-frontal, no-holds-barred, hang-the-cost accessible to me in every way imaginable.
I’ve long been a fan of Four Seasons hotels. The drapes in their rooms are thicker than Tony Soprano’s money clip. The bed sheets have a thread count that only NASA’s Pleiades and Aitken machines can calculate. And they take the single best element of what Americans demand on their holidays to all their properties worldwide. In essence, this is the guest ethos: ‘I pay a larcenous amount for my health insurance and I only get ten paid days’ vacation a year. So faffing, mistakes and staff incompetence are not going to cut it while I’m staying here.’
A claw-footed tub in the bathroom
The Four Seasons strives to be perfect in a way that even those landed gentries of Mayfair hotels don’t quite have the kinetic zeal to compete with. So I felt that if any hotel was going to wow this disabled guest, then it would be in their Georgian manor house just above the South Downs with its 500 surrounding acres of undulating fields.
When speaking to the travel industry about disability at corporate events, I find myself returning to the bromide of how to talk to guests with disabilities and/or access needs. I won’t elaborate too much here about my experiences of having tour guides and airport staff take my arm without asking permission or being handed (again, without asking) large-print menus embossed on sheets
broader than a Rothko canvas. But the solution for all hospitality staff who may feel nervous about offending a disabled person is effortless; keep questions open-ended.
If a nervous hotel worker asks me, ‘Can I help you with that room key fob?’ then I’m likely to start wondering how, exactly, I’m humiliating myself to the point where this employee feels the need to intervene. But if the question is simply, ‘Can I help?’ then myself, and every other disabled person, feels immediately that they’re in control of the situation and that no presumptions are being laid down by someone who, in all probability, doesn’t know an albino from an Albanian.
Anyone who has watched Deliverance knows just what damage a bow and arrow can do if fired erratically
The Four Seasons staff in Hampshire, as it turns out, are rather good at all this. But they’re even better at being in abeyance to the radical notion that some disabled people might want to splash their cash. Not only is there more than one accessible room. There are accessible suites. And they’re not even on the ground floor overlooking the overflow coach park. The noted lack of obstacles to graze, bruise and snag my skin and clothing was a given. But my suite (reached by a sizable lift that doesn’t require you to tap your room key for it to move) was proof of just how aesthetically pleasing accessible hotel rooms can be.
The raft of extra rails and the shower seat in adapted bathrooms can often make them look like palliative emergency rooms. Yet here, the tsunami of marble was intact despite the adjustments. It looked beautiful, and saying that about a disabled-friendly hotel bathroom is a compliment on the ‘nice Moldovan wine’ levels of rarity. But I was in a demanding mood, so the Olympus-esque bathrooms weren’t quite enough to impress me. And I wanted to take advantage of all this sumptuous Home County bucolic space. So I asked for an archery lesson on the lawn.
Equestrian activities
Martin Morrell
Anyone who has watched Deliverance knows just what damage a bow and arrow can do if fired erratically. But I had the patience and skill of Ryan, the in-house instructor, to help me. Not being able to see the target face (and therefore, know whether I had hit the bullseye or any unfortunate passing bull) was innovatively solved by Ryan tying balloons to it. When I hit the target, which, incredibly, I did manage, the popping sound quickly replaced the bivalve release of an oyster being shucked as my new all-time favourite noise. So to dinner at the Wild Carrot restaurant. It didn’t surprise me that my fusilli with truffle and crispy onion was dexterously made and avoided the mistake that all manqué Italian kitchen enthusiasts make in the UK which is thinking the sauce is the important bit. The pasta is the important bit and this dish was as good as anything I’ve had in deepest Calabria.
Not only that, but despite almost certainly having been told that the male guest on one of her tables was visually impaired, my server Becky avoided any patronising, ‘can I help you read the menu?’ type solicitations. She just got on with being a great waitress while giving me a reassuring, unspoken expectation that if I needed the menu translated into Flemish then it would be done within five minutes. Making a hotel accessible really isn’t that hard. But, to truly see it done well, as I did in Hampshire, comes at a pretty steep price.
Just like able-bodied people, we want hotels to be a place for sex, cocktails and eggs benedict before a late check out
But the Four Seasons have really only done one thing, and it’s something even the most frugal budget hostel can emulate. They’ve simply incorporated the kind of holistic, lateral attitude that all types of accommodation should impart to their guests, and have included people with disabilities too.
The next step is to get Travelodge, Premier Inn and all the lumpen bed and breakfasts in Harrogate, Houston and Le Havre to do the same. I don’t expect archery lessons to be thrown in wherever I lay my hat. But I would quite like the hotel industry to stop thinking that disabled people will be grateful for anything as long as we can get to the bathroom without injuring ourselves.
Just like able-bodied people, we want hotels to be a place for sex, cocktails and eggs benedict before a late check out. If all we get is condescension, a crap bedroom view and a grazed knee, well, frankly, we can find all that at home for nothing.
