I just booked an accessible room at a hotel and it is $25 more than a non-accessible room. Is this legal?

Well it depends. By law hotels are required to have a certain number of accessible rooms based on their size. This ranges from one accessible room for a place with 25 rooms, to 9 accessible rooms in a property with 500 rooms. After 500 rooms, they are required to have 2% of their total rooms accessible.

And no matter how many rooms a property has, the accessible rooms are supposed to be distributed among the various room types. What does that mean exactly? Well if they have multiple accessible rooms, they have to be equally distributed between the economy rooms and the high-end rooms. It also means that they should offer a choice in bed types, or other amenities such as ocean views. The problem comes when the property only has one or two accessible rooms, but a large variety of room types. Then some choices have to be made on how to allocate the rooms so that guests who need these rooms will have a reasonable choice.

Now, I’m not sure what happened in your case. It could be that the property only had two accessible rooms, and the economy choice was already booked, so the only thing left was the higher-end accessible room. That’s totally legal, and it’s an issue that all guests face. What’s not legal is for them to only have accessible rooms in the high-end category, and none in the economy category.

To be honest, it’s really difficult to tell, because all room types aren’t adequately described online. I would call the manager and voice your concerns, and specifically ask him or her how their accessible rooms are allocated. If indeed they only have them in the high-end category, I would ask for a price adjustment, because legally they are suppose to be distributed throughout the inventory.
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