FINISHED FILE
MIDATLANTIC ADA
APRIL 11, 2013
1:00 P.M. CST

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> MODERATOR: Okay. At this moment we are ready to begin our session. I am turning things over to Nancy Horton our host, our session host.

> NANCY HORTON: Thank you, Maynor. And good morning, and welcome to everyone. Welcome to our webinar on customizing customer service, the first session in our series Unlocking the mystery of ADA accessibility; lodging information made accessible.
This is presented by the MidAtlantic ADA Center. My name is Nancy Horton and I am an information specialist with the MidAtlantic ADA Center. We are privileged to be joined today by our presenter Marian Vessels and I will introduce her shortly. But first we want to let you know about a few features of the webinar platform and how you can use them during today's session.
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Now before we get started I would like to introduce Marian Vessels who is going to provide us with some really valuable information today. Marian is a director of the MidAtlantic ADA Center. She has been in that position for 16 years and for the past six years she has led the ADA National Network's hospitality initiative working with stakeholders across the country including leaders from the American Hotel and Lodging Association and the Asian American Hotel Owners Association. Prior to taking the reigns at the ADA center Marian served as the executive director of the Maryland Governor's Committee of Employment with people with disabilities and has been working in the disability field for more than 25 years serving on numerous boards and task forces on state and national levels in addition to her fulltime work. She is an expert in the Americans with Disabilities Act as well as other federal and state disability laws and accessibility standards.
Additionally she herself is a seasoned traveller. She travels extensively both personally and professionally across the country and around the world. As a wheelchair user who travels sometimes independently and often with family members and colleagues and groups she has a broad range and valuable perspective to share with us. I would like to turn the program over to Marian.

> MARIAN VESSELS: Thank you, Nancy. We are very excited to present this information on hotel customer service and the ADA. Again to remind you please submit your questions as we go along because we value your perspective and concerns. Nancy introduced us as an ADA center. We are one of ten regional ADA centers providing training in all formats. Webinar as you see today is one. We do face to face trainings. We do distance online learning. We archive our webinars so that as she mentioned you will be able to go back and review this or share it with colleagues. Lots and lots of resources to get training in any format that you may be needing. We have a variety of materials available on all aspects of the ADA. If you have 15 or more employees, we can talk to you about employment issues. We have a whole website, www.adahospitality.org that focuses specifically on the hospitality industry.
We have other ways to communicate with you. We all have newsletters or ebulletins or blogs that will provide you with the latest information on regulations, resources, and trainings in your community.
Because we are a regional center and there is ten of us around the country we also know the important players in our communities. And we can refer you to local entities to assist you. We are also funded by the U.S. Department of Education, the National Institute of Disability Rehabilitation and we are not an advocacy organization. We are information education. The Department of Education is a great home for us because we educate all aspects of the law and every consumer or business that has a need to learn about the ADA. As many of you may know the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act is a civil law that was passed in 1990. So we have 22 years experience with the ADA today.
The ADA prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities by all kinds of entities. Hotels, restaurants, gas stations, the barber shop, grocery stores, movie theaters, state and local government. A wide variety of entities that any of us go to on a daily basis. The goal of the ADA is to provide full inclusion of people with disabilities in all aspects of society. Before 1990 there really was no law that prohibited people from discriminating against people with disabilities in places of what we call public accommodation such as hotels and restaurants and other private businesses.
So people with disabilities were often excluded from business opportunities, activities, and employment because the buildings were not accessible. The attitudes were if you had a disability you probably shouldn't be participating or we are not accessible. So we are just not going to bother. And we want to show you today that it is a strong, vibrant community that you are going to want to reach out to and learn about this specific community.
I have a quick quiz for you. How many of people with disabilities are there in the United States? Take a guess. 56 million people. And these are only the people that are identified to the U.S. Census Bureau that they had a disability. So we figure that it is at least this and probably much, much more.
There is still a stigma about labeling yourself as a person with a disability. So many people do not identify that they have a disability for fear of stigmatization. So with that 56 million that equates to nearly 19 percent of the U.S. population currently today. That's roughly one in every five people. It is a huge number. And the numbers of folks with disabilities are growing. If you look at our returning service members who are coming back with a variety of disabilities, we are living longer today due to medical improvements. So we have got more and more people who are aging and are still vibrant and functioning and traveling. So we want to make sure that we include all of these folks.
Baby Boomers, there are 76 million of us aging Baby Boomers. And according to the NOD, the National Organization on Disability people between the ages of 55 and 64 have about a 22 percent chance of developing a disability. And that number jumps to 42 percent for people over 65 and older who have functional limitations. You may wonder what the difference is between disability and functional limitation is. Possibly not much. But really functional limitation is a much less scientific and legal term. And people often describe their needs as I don't have a disability but I just can't walk as well, hear as well, see as well, step over the edge of the bathroom as well and would never identify themselves as being a person with a disability but still needs accommodations and modifications to allow them to fully engage in your offerings which could be any number of things.
Baby booming spending is a really important thing to look at. We have a graph that shows that folks 55 or 64 spend the most of any age group on travel per year. It is almost 1900 dollars. Coming in about a strong fourth is population 65 years and older and they spend almost 1200 dollars a year. A big market. And we know that from our statistics earlier that 22 percent of that 55 to 64 community is possibly going to have a disability. And it jumps to 44 percent, well over a third of those are going to have disabilities after age 65.
More than 21 million adults with disabilities traveled at least once in the last two years according to Open Doors Organization. And 50 percent of them stayed in hotels during their trips. Again a booming market. Some of the problems were that 60 percent of those guests that were surveyed that had disabilities said the hotel had problems that were physical barriers. There wasn't an accessible room. They couldn't maneuver around the hotel easily. There were communication barriers. They didn't have an access kit that provided a TTY, door knockers, things like that and customer service problems. We still hear today that many people who were in the service industry including hotel workers are reticent to communicate with people with disabilities. And one of the big fears is that they are going to embarrass themselves or the other person by saying the wrong thing. We hope that this training today will provide you some skills and techniques that you can use in your own property. For sure that doesn't happen in the future.
Okay. We have defined the market. How do we attract the market? How do we bring them to our property? One way we do that is welcoming them. Removing barriers. Do a site survey. We can certainly recommend several tools for you to use that aren't sophisticated and can be done by any of your engineers or property site managers to determine how accessible your facility is. You can communicate effectively. And we will be teaching you those tools today. And focus on customer service. You are in the customer service business. So we often found as I just mentioned there is some reticence to want to communicate with folks with disabilities, not sure how to do it and because of that are more reluctant to engage people with disabilities as their customer service methods.
What are some examples of accessibility we are talking about? Very, very simple common sense kind of ones that if you don't think about them you may not realize that it is an acceptable method. Reading materials out loud, if you have somebody with a visual disability in front of you and they seem to be struggling, offer. I would be happy to read them out loud to you. What about exchanging notes for somebody who is deaf or hardofhearing? That, too, can be an acceptable way to be able to communicate with someone. We don't expect you to know sign language, but we do expect you to engage in what we call the interactive process. So if one method is not working find another. So if you realize when you are talking with them that they aren't hearing or understanding you and they maybe indicate to you maybe by pointing to their ear that they can't hear you, then try another approach. Accessible parking spaces, seems pretty obvious but we still know a lot of hotels don't have good accessible parking spaces. Parking spaces for those who use vans like myself with lifts as well as the standard accessible parking spaces. They can be critical for a person with limited mobility to be able to get and to maneuver in to the hotel and get registered and you will be able to participate.
Fire alarm signals with flashing lights, again this is the concept of universal design. It works not only for somebody who is deaf or hardofhearing and may not hear the alarm and need to rely on that flashing light to let them know there is an emergency, but for many of us who may have our headsets on and are not listening to signs and signals may be able to see the flashing light and know that there is a concern or problem.
Having signs with Braille characters are required under the ADA design standard. Those design standards talk about having Braille characters on rooms, and building areas so that people know that they are in room 322 and the Braille sign it says room 322.
An obvious one but sometimes we do forget make sure there is no stepped entrances. You may have though in some places on property places where there are steps and yet you have provided a wonderful ramp very often those ramps are hidden and are not obvious. Simple signage can go a long way to identify where the ramp is. So just a simple wheelchair symbol with an arrow can mean a lot to finding a good accessible trail. I was at a property recently that had tiered pool areas and they had it was wonderful. Lots of pools. Deck chairs, lawn chairs and it was all terraced so that you could look down in to the pool but it was intimidated of how I was going to get down to a lower level. And I looked up in their signage package in their colors, very well done was a beautiful sign with a wheelchair and route and it showed me the route to reach every single terrace level in my wheelchair.