ACCESSIBILITY PASS aims to help people with accessibility needs find a hotel or conference center that can accommodate their specific needs, making their overall hospitality experience a simple and friendly one.
It is a global certification scheme that classifies hotels’ and conference centers’ accessibility level, based on their infrastructure, services and personnel skills.
Based on universal criteria, ACCESSIBILITY PASS evaluates the accessibility features of hotels and conference centers, including existing infrastructure, services and personnel’s proven capability to cater for individuals with accessibility needs, i.e. seniors and people with disabilities. It provides an objective classification and detailed information to enable everyone to make an educated choice of accessible holiday or business accommodation.
Certified Hotels and Conference Centers may offer different levels of accessibility to their guests, so ACCESSIBILITY PASS attributes different certification levels, according to the degree of accessibility offered to guests.
ACCESSIBILITY PASS certificates awarded to hotels and conference centers certify their accessibility at the moment they were awarded and are valid for one year. Renewal through re-assessment is required, for the certification to be valid. In the meantime, it is the hotel’s or conference center’s responsibility to ensure that its accessibility features are maintained during the certification period.
ACCESSIBILITY PASS verifies that a hotel or a conference center offers people with accessibility needs an equal service experience with any other client. It does not guarantee the overall quality of services offered.
ACCESSIBILITY PASS’s strengths and advantages over other accessibility schemes are that it offers all of the following:
- It ensures that venue’s classification is objective and reliable, by only using data collected by Authorized Auditors on site, specified classification criteria and a global method of assessment. In many other schemes, the hotel itself provides its own assessment.
- It ensures that the personnel is skilled in providing services to people with access requirements, by checking that there are employees duly certified to offer such services. For hotels not fulfilling this requirement, it offers appropriate training material and will not certify them until the certification requirements of the personnel have been fulfilled. This is a unique feature of ACCESSIBILITY PASS.
It offers detailed information about a certified hotel’s features that gives everyone grounds to decide whether the hotel is accessible enough for them. By other accessibility schemes, this is not possible to do, as the detail registered is much briefer.
