How local businesses can support accessible U.S. travel

What to take away

• Publish numbers and photographs. Measurements let people decide for themselves.
• Say what you do not have. Honesty wins customers; vagueness loses them permanently.
• Train the front desk on one page of facts, since most failures are information failures.
• Work with the town, because the curb outside your door is the town's responsibility and your problem.

The businesses that do well with accessible travelers are rarely the ones with the most expensive adaptations. They are the ones that answer questions precisely.

Publish measurements, not adjectives

Replace "wheelchair accessible" with facts:

• Entrance: level, or one step of 12cm with a portable ramp available
• Door clear width: 84cm
• Accessible restroom: yes, grab bar on the left as seated
• Tables: two with 74cm clearance underneath
• Parking: two accessible spaces, 20 meters from the door, paved

Add three photographs: the entrance from the pavement, the route inside, the restroom door open. Take them at seated height with something in frame for scale, because a shot from standing height flattens a ramp and hides a threshold. That page will be read more than anything else on your website.

Say what you do not have

A business that says plainly that it has a step at the door, no accessible restroom and a narrow aisle is more useful than one that says accessible and disappoints on arrival.

Travelers plan around known limits. They cannot plan around an unpleasant surprise, and the surprise is what generates the review nobody recovers from.

Know roughly what applies to you

The obligations on private businesses are set out in the Justice Department's primer on Title III, covering barrier removal that is readily achievable, policy modifications and communication.

Public bodies work to a different part of the same law. The primer on Title II covers state and local government programs and services, which is what applies to the municipal car park, the visitor center and the public restroom your customers use.

Knowing which applies to you, and which applies to the pavement outside, tells you what you can fix and what you have to campaign for.

Train the desk on one page

Most failures are information failures. A visitor asks whether there is a step and gets a shrug.

Write one page: entrance, door widths, restroom, parking, lift status, best approach route, and what to do if the lift is out. Put it beside the telephone. Update it when anything changes.

The cost side belongs on that page too: the accessible room rate beside the standard one, the companion policy, and which equipment is free.

That single page prevents more problems than any amount of goodwill.

Work with the town

Your entrance can be perfect and unreachable. Curb ramps, crossing times, pavement condition and parking enforcement belong to the municipality.

Businesses that raise these collectively, with specific locations and photographs, get them fixed. Individually, they mostly do not.

The commercial case, stated plainly

Accessible travelers plan further ahead, stay longer, travel in groups, and return to places that worked. They also tell each other, in detail, which is why the information page pays for itself.

What those travelers are actually asking is set out in the booking questions, and what they consistently find missing is a short list of things most businesses could fix in a week.

Common questions

We are in a historic building. What can we realistically do? Publish the limits precisely, offer alternatives, and look at portable ramps, staff assistance and service at an accessible table.

Do we need to rebuild the restroom? Look at what is readily achievable for your business first, and get advice before assuming either that you must or that you cannot.

Is a portable ramp acceptable? It depends on the setting, the gradient and whether somebody is available to deploy it. It is frequently a reasonable interim step.

How do we know what to measure? Door clear widths, step heights, restroom dimensions, table clearances and parking distance. Those five answer most enquiries.