Disabled woman forced to sleep on sofa in hotel dining room

A woman in a wheelchair who booked an accessible hotel room for her special needs was instead forced to sleep in the hotel’s dining room because the room was reportedly not cleaned in time.

On April 26, Englishwoman Kat Watkins, 36, had carefully planned her trip to London to attend singer James Bay’s show, when she was reportedly denied access to the accessible room she had rented. at the Travelodge hotel in Hounslow, The Guardian reported on Sunday.

On the pretext that the room was “out of order”, the employees would have instead suggested that the woman call a taxi as soon as she returned from the concert, to take her to another Travelodge establishment.

Except that when he returned from the concert around half past midnight, no wheelchair-accessible taxi was available, and the “out of order” room had been offered to someone else, since it was not simply not cleaned when he arrived earlier in the day, the woman reportedly learned.

His only option: an “incredibly hard” sofa placed in the dining room of the establishment, to accommodate the woman suffering from the disease of “glass bones”, a disease which causes great fragility of the bones.

“The concert I attended was good but I have a bitter memory because the experience I had was so traumatic. I have never experienced anything as horrible as this before. […] I’ve had back pain since that night,” Ms. Watkins told The Guardian.

Although the hotel would have “sincerely apologised” by email, the 30-year-old, who works as a development officer for the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, lamented the establishment’s lack of openness to conversation. , which would benefit from adapting its practices.

“We are almost a fifth of the population [17 % au Royaume-Uni]we are many, and we need to be included in society, and not just an ulterior motive of society”, she would have hammered to “The Independent”.

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