Question About Accessible Hotel Rooms In Tokyo
Question About Accessible Hotel Rooms In Tokyo
From opnsrce on the Accessible Japan website forum:
I’m going through some of the recently added hotel listings on your site that have accessible rooms and I have some questions:
1. a lot of the descriptions say that the hotel being described has an accessible room. Just to be clear, are you saying that the entire hotel has a single accessible hotel room?
2. A lot of the hotels list the accessible room bed size as “twin”. Is that an “if two people sleep in this bed you better be prepared to spoon the entire night” size twin bed or does it mean something different?
3. I’m a high functioning paraplegic who can stand, climb stairs if there’s something to hold on to, and I’ll be traveling with an ultra-light titanium folding chair. Would I have a more comfortable / luxurious experience if I just stayed in a standard, non accessible hotel room?
Hi opnsrce,
Thanks for getting in touch! To answer your questions:
- Correct, it means there is only 1 accessible room in the hotel.  The vast majority of hotels in Japan only have one option for accessible rooms.  On the hotel page, clicking on the “More Info” tab will show you how many rooms are available.
- “Twin” room means there are two single beds in the room. Â It may not be the standard term(?), but it is what is used in Japan, so we wanted to keep the same terms as the hotels themselves use.
- That may be the best solution for you. Â If you can handle a standard room in other countries, you should be fine in a standard room in most hotels here in Japan. Â And, if you want a room that is nicer / luxurious, the accessible rooms may disappoint you.
However, it should be noted that if you stay in a smaller, local-brand hotel, the standard room may be smaller than you expect and there may be a step into the bathroom area or a communal bath etc. While this type of hotel is not as common, such small “business hotels” do still exist.
Hopefully hotels will change their attitudes as more people with disabilities start to travel here.
Hope that helps!
Awesome. Thank you for clarifying. I’ll definitely do some more research and see what the options are like across the more common “Western” brands of hotels (e.g., Hyatt and Hilton). Do you happen to have any experience with those? Are they comparable to their American counterparts?
For the most part… they are not as good as the American ones but not bad.  In the US, if there was say a “standard room”, a “deluxe room” and an “executive room”, there would be an “accessible standard room”, an “accessible deluxe room” and an “accessible executive room”. In Japan, there would only be an “accessible standard room”. (Sorry, not sure if that is true of the all hotels in the States.)
So, while the ADA doesn’t apply to a branch of the “Western” Â hotels here, the are at least aware of it and follow the minimum corporate standards for their company brand.
They are “safe bets”, but not carbon copies.
If you find any good information, please share it with everyone here!
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