Whoever describes the accessible room books the whole family
On Booking.com, a roll-in shower is a yes or a no, and Booking.com tells guests who need one to ask the hotel. The rest of the family's rooms follow the answer.
by Markus Busch
The phone rings at reservations. A woman is planning a week at the coast for six, and her mother uses a wheelchair. Your Booking.com listing says "roll-in shower." She wants to know whether there's a lip at the entrance and whether the seat folds down.
Whoever answers that well gets the booking. Every room of it: the parents, the kids, the grandmother. In a report out this week, Fora, the travel advisor network, says 56 percent of the US consumers it surveyed plan a multigenerational trip in the next three years with someone who has an accessibility need.
What the channel can hold. Booking.com's developer documentation lists every facility a hotel can load, current as of October 2025. The accessibility items are all there. Roll-in shower, walk-in shower, shower chair, grab rails, raised toilet, lowered sink, emergency pull cord. Each one is a switch: present or missing. There is no field for the width of the door or the height of the step.
Expedia keeps accessibility in its own section of Partner Central. Its developer documentation warns that what a hotel sends is not necessarily what the site shows, and that some details may be edited or left off.
Booking.com knows what its own listing is worth to this guest. Its traveler guide, published this summer, says "accessible" can mean different things at different hotels and calls contacting the hotel directly the most practical step.
That's why your phone rang.
What a wrong answer costs. The same Fora report, as PhocusWire covered it, says 31 percent of Fora's advisors have had a client arrive to find an accessibility feature missing or unusable. Expedia's own 2022 accessibility guide for hotels names what follows. The guest cancels, books a property that can guarantee the feature, and writes the review.
In the US, the law asks for exactly the detail the switch can't carry. The Justice Department's reservations rule, in force since 2012, requires a hotel to describe its accessible features well enough for a guest to judge them independently, including on bookings made through third parties. Its lodging guidance says hotels must hand those third parties the information.
What to do. Send someone round the accessible rooms with a tape measure and a phone. Door width, the step into the shower, the seat, bed height, where the grab bars sit. Photograph the shower entrance.
Put all of it on your own website first, because that is where Booking.com points the guest. Give the same sheet to whoever answers the phone.
What it buys. The call Booking.com sent you carries no commission. Answered from the sheet, it's six rooms for a week. Answered with "let me check and call you back," it's six rooms at the hotel down the road.
The limits. Fora sells advisors as the answer to exactly this problem, and it paid for the survey: YouGov polled the consumers, Fora polled its own advisors. The 31 percent counts advisors, not stays. Booking.com's extranet may offer a free-text box for the detail; its facility list does not. The legal duty applies to US properties.
Then copy the measurements into the room name and description on every channel, and check them every spring and every fall.
Read also: AI is confidently wrong about your hotel, and the guest arrives believing it · Fora is inside Virtuoso — and just raised $60 million at a $1 billion valuation
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