Nobody Built a Hotel Room for 70 Million People. Somebody Should Have.
Key Takeaways
- Roughly 70 million American adults — about 28.7% of the adult population — live with some form of functional disability, per CDC data.
- Disabled travelers spend an estimated $50-58 billion a year on trips in the U.S. alone, and they travel about as often as everyone else.
- A handful of luxury properties — The Ned NoMad in New York, NoMad London among them — are showing that accessible rooms don't have to look, or feel, clinical.
- Marriott settled with the DOJ in 2024 over how badly it was handling accessible-room bookings. Even the biggest hotel company in the world was getting this wrong.
For an industry built on the idea of knowing exactly what a guest wants before they ask, hospitality has been strangely incurious about one very large group of guests. Roughly 70 million American adults — more than a quarter of the adult population — live with some form of disability. Globally, that number climbs past 1.3 billion. And yet walk into most "accessible" hotel rooms and you'll find the same tired formula: a grab bar here, a slightly wider door there, all of it looking like it was added by a different design team than the one that did the rest of the hotel. Because it usually was.
Here's the part that should embarrass the industry more than it seems to: these travelers aren't a rounding error. Research from the Open Doors Organization puts disabled Americans' annual travel spending somewhere between $50 and $58 billion. They take leisure trips at roughly the same rate as everyone else. They travel with companions, partners, kids. And for years, the hospitality industry has treated their comfort as a compliance checkbox rather than a design problem worth solving well.
A few properties are quietly proving it doesn't have to be this way. The Ned NoMad in New York built its accessible rooms — low beds, roll-in showers, assistance alarms — right into the same design language as the rest of the hotel, down to an Accessible Rotunda Suite that's meant to be one of the more distinctive rooms in the building, not an afterthought. NoMad London did something similar: wet rooms with proper shower seating, grab rails woven into the actual interior design instead of bolted on top of it, step-free access from the front door to every floor. Small sample size, sure. But it's proof of concept, and proof of concept is usually how an industry-wide shift starts.
The uncomfortable footnote here is that this isn't purely a design failure — it's also, in places, a legal one. Marriott reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in 2024 after failing to reliably list and honor accessible-room bookings across its properties. Not a design flaw. An operations one — guests couldn't even trust that the accessible room they'd booked would be the room waiting for them. If the largest hotel company on earth was fumbling the basics, it's a fair bet plenty of others still are.
What separates the properties getting this right from the ones still treating it as an obligation isn't budget. It's whether accessibility got a seat at the table when the room was first sketched out, or whether it showed up later as a retrofit nobody wanted to spend real design hours on. That's not a hard problem to diagnose. It's just one the industry has mostly chosen not to look at too closely — until the travelers it's been ignoring start taking their $50 billion somewhere else.
