For Lorraine Woodward, the barrier to taking a family vacation was finding a wheelchair accessible vacation rental.
“I remember a trip to New York City,” Lorraine Woodward said. “The boys each were in their scooters, and I was in my wheelchair, and we were crossing Times Square. My husband was at the corner, and he was freaking out, going, ‘Oh my gosh,’ and I said, ‘We’re okay, we’re okay; stay calm.’ He wouldn’t walk with us until we got over to the other side.”
That experience marked the beginning of many years without a family vacation.
For many families, going on vacation is a matter of finding room in the budget and on the calendar. For the Woodward family and thousands like theirs, it was a matter of finding accommodations and destinations that were safe and wheelchair-accessible.
Lorraine Woodward and her two sons, Nathan, 26, and Alexander, 24, all have muscular dystrophy, a genetic disorder that causes progressive muscle degeneration and weakness.
The family rarely traveled away from their home in Raleigh, North Carolina, because of the difficulty in finding accessible lodging. Trying to keep Lorraine and the two boys safe also was hard on her husband, Robert.
But as the boys got older, Lorraine couldn’t keep living with the status quo. “My oldest, Nathan, was graduating from high school, and I thought, I don’t want my boys not to vacation,” she recounted.
A wheelchair-accessible vacation rental
So, she decided to do something about it: She built her own vacation home with wide doors, zero thresholds, an elevator, hospital bed, and roll-in shower in the small town of Carolina Beach, North Carolina. They named it A Place of No Worries.
At first, Lorraine simply relished the experience of getting away and visiting the sandy beach and rushing waves. “I love it. I spend the summers and a lot of the year at the beach house, as much as I can, until my boys, my cats, or my husband say, ‘Hey, come home,’” Lorraine said.
When the family wasn’t using the home, they rented it out via short-term rental platforms to help cover the cost of construction and maintenance.
Yearning for a vacation
Through reviews and word of mouth, the rental gained a following of people with disabilities who were starving for a vacation. Guests were coming from all over the world to stay in the rental in this lesser-known beach town with a population of just 6,200.
“I was blown away and continue to be blown away by how far people will travel to come to our property,” Lorraine said. “I always ask, why are you driving two and a half days to come to Carolina Beach? They are like, ‘Lorraine, there’s nothing else like your home.’ I couldn’t imagine that because I thought, well, if I did it, surely other people did it.”
Even though the family had built the beach house for themselves, Lorraine increasingly felt a sense of purpose from being able to give these travel experiences to other people with disabilities. For instance, a family that stayed in the beach house said that they had not had a vacation together for 28 years because of the lack of accessible accommodations.
Through informal audits of booking platforms, Lorraine also found that even when accessible vacation rentals existed, they were difficult to find. Some platforms lack detailed filters to find accessible properties, and there is no system in place to verify whether a property is actually accessible, apart from trial and error and reviews by guests with disabilities.
Lorraine saw that the short-term rental industry was missing out on a huge customer base given that about 26% of adults in the United States live with some type of disability (61 million), according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Yet, there are 23 states with zero accessible rentals, she said.
Advocating for more accessible vacation rentals
So, in early 2021, she founded Becoming rentABLE, a website and education platform that certifies accessibility features at short-term rentals and provides a clearinghouse of accessible properties listed on dozens of online travel agencies such as Vrbo.
Becoming rentABLE’s ultimate mission is to increase the nation’s stock of accessible short-term rentals by educating property owners on ways to make their rentals more accessible. The organization does that through its website, certification program, a regular blog, appearances on short-term rental podcasts, and a television show that is under development.
Lorraine worked with a team of researchers at Harvard University to come up with the certification guidelines for accessible properties that significantly update the now out-of-date Americans with Disabilities Act, which was passed in 1990. The researchers designed a survey for Becoming rentABLE to validate what people with disabilities need in an accessible property.
“We expanded what we look at as accessible short-term rentals to include wheelchair mobility, walker, autism/[intellectual or developmental disabilities (IDD)], and vision and hearing-friendly,” Lorraine said. “We have a five-prong focus on what we believe is a fully accessible property, and nobody else in the short-term rental industry is doing that.”
A clearinghouse of accessible vacation rentals
Becoming rentABLE recently debuted List My Property on the website, where STR industry managers and owners can submit their property for review. Once Becoming rentABLE’s team of 14 volunteers validates the property’s accessibility features through photos and a questionnaire, the property is listed on the website. The number of properties has been growing rapidly since List My Property started and is expected to soon reach 500.
Later this month, owners, guests, and advocates for people with disabilities also can start submitting properties for accessibility certification. Getting validated and listed on the website is free of charge. However, the certification process will entail a small fee, which was still being determined in early February of 2022.
Meanwhile, guests can visit the Becoming rentABLE website to find a property and book the property through the online travel agency where it’s listed. “We are not a travel agency but a resource to help make the search for an accessible short-term rental property more convenient and less cumbersome,” Lorraine said.
A model for accessible vacation rentals
Lorraine herself is working on building a model wheelchair-accessible vacation rental in her hometown of Conway, Arkansas. Affectionately christened the Little Yellow House, the 900-square-foot property will be the state’s first fully accessible vacation rental, incorporating more than 70 accessibility features.
Lorraine and Robert are self-funding the renovations but have launched several fundraisers and are accepting sponsorships to help support the project. Supporters can help out by contributing to the house’s Go Fund Me page or purchasing donated items on Becoming rentABLE’s eBay site.
Reality TV series on accessible vacation rentals
A big part of Becoming rentABLE’s educational outreach will involve producing a reality television series that follows the process of renovating or constructing a short-term rental to make it accessible.
The show will also introduce viewers to families or individuals with disabilities who are looking for a vacation rental. Those potential guests will describe their disability and their needs at a vacation property.
Viewers then can watch the process of making the adaptations and get a cost breakdown. Experts also will share tips on how to make inexpensive adaptations that make a property accessible to someone with a disability.
Lorraine encourages vacation rental owners and managers not to look at their property through an all-or-nothing lens. There are so many different kinds of disabilities. Making a home accessible to people with one or more kinds of disabilities doesn’t necessarily mean installing an elevator, for instance.
It could mean making a home accessible to children with autism, for example, with features like soft lighting, neutral colors, and pet friendliness (many kids with autism have service animals.)
Lorraine is pitching the series to networks like HGTV, Netflix, and Hulu. Her goal is to start airing the show by the end of 2023.
“I feel like if we can reach the masses and educate people about what it means to be accessible, then maybe we would see a shift,” she said.
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