In Which The Heroine Continues To Search For A Place To Stay In Portland

 I have one more day to prep for the trip, and didn’t get nearly enough done today. So naturally, instead of doing any of that stuff, I’m writing! Perfect.  I wanted to update one more time (okay, maybe two) before I actually left.  There was so much more prep work for the trip, that the last post doesn’t really do the amount of work justice.  

The same night that I was researching Portland hostels, I was also perusing the Airbnb website.  I ran a search for wheelchair accessible listings, and came up with a mere 18. None of them had extensive information on exactly what the accessible features were, or detailed information on how close to public transportation they were.  I also have no frame of reference for any of the neighborhoods, so I needed to know more about the topographical features of the exact street each listing was on before I could make an informed decision about whether or not a listing was worth pursuing.  Even if a listing was perfectly accessible down to the last detail on the inside, if it’s up a big hill, the accessible amenities are wasted on me. As a manual wheelchair user, I can only push myself up blocks with relatively low-grade slopes. I found each listing to be lacking in the kind of information I needed, which meant I’d have had to contact the person who listed each place and ask a series of questions, which would make for a rather slow process.  And even then, I wouldn’t be guaranteed an accurate answer due to the inaccurate nature of self-reporting. In addition, all 18 listings were being offered at $70 a night and up. At that rate, I would be better off booking a room at a hotel, which would be guaranteed to offer standard accessible rooms that met ADA requirements.

That said, all of this made me wonder what the exact criteria a listing had to meet in order to be considered accessible. So I sent an email to the administrators of the site asking exactly that.  My fear was that the requirements would be vague or worse, nonexistent.  The site itself has a very Craigslisty vibe in that each listing is written by the person offering their home as a place to stay.  This type of self-reporting can be really troublesome when it comes to accessibility. In my experience, most people who do not deal with disability on an intimate level, either through work or their personal lives, tend to have a rather vague, misguided, and all too often inaccurate, understanding of what ADA accessibility standards actually are.  So unless Airbnb tightly regulates such claims, or I had the good luck to find the listing of someone whose access needs closely matched my own, or who was an architect etc., there was a good chance that these accessible listings would turn out to be only marginally equipped to handle a guest who is a wheelchair user.

My curiosity got the better of me, and I just couldn’t wait until the next day to find out exactly how these listings work.  I decided to do a little detective work on my own, and  begin to create a very basic listing for my apartment here in the Bay.  That way, I’d be able to see what options were available to those who had listed the places in Portland. Unfortunately, my suspicions were confirmed.  While creating my listing, I found out that minimal explanation is required of the person making the listing.  And worse still, there is minimal explanation offered by Airbnb as to which accessible features count towards making a unit accessible. There is only one section that allows a person to mark their listing as accessible.  At a certain point in the process of creating a listing, a menu titled “Amenities” gives the person making the listing a chance to highlight certain features of the home, including such things as washer/dryer, elevator, doorman, etc. One of the features listed is titled “Handicap Accessible.”  For starters, the word “handicap” is largely unused these days, both for political and semantic reasons…  But I digress.  Next to the term "handicap accessible", there is an info icon that clarifies what this particular feature means. I hovered over this icon and the phrase "The property is easily accessible.  Guests should communicate about individual needs."  pops up.  So there we have it. The phrase “easily accessible” is subject to many interpretations, and the onus is on the traveler to seek additional information from a person who may or may not have the best grasp of  ADA accessibility. Bummer.

Later in the week, I received a reply from Airbnb about my inquiry explaining what I’d already found out myself. And so the search for a place to stay continued a little while longer.