A guest with a mobility device does not care that your listing says "accessible." They've been burned by that word before — by a bathroom door that turns out to be 23 inches wide, or a "step-free entrance" that has one step nobody bothered to count. What they need is numbers, and most listings don't have any.
Start at the street
Before a guest even reaches your door, they want to know what the path looks like. Is there a curb cut, or does the sidewalk just end? Is the walkway gravel, pavers, or smooth concrete? If someone's rolling a suitcase or a wheelchair from a drop-off point, how many feet is it and is any of it uphill?
Write it like this: "Parking is on the street directly in front of the building. The sidewalk is smooth concrete, about 40 feet from the curb to the front door, flat the whole way." That sentence tells a guest everything "easy access" was supposed to mean and didn't.
Count every step, not just the big ones
Hosts tend to mention the obvious staircase and skip the two steps up to the porch, or the single step down into the sunken living room. Guests who use a cane, a walker, or a wheelchair plan their whole trip around these.
Go through the entire path a guest would take — from the curb to the bed, and separately to the bathroom — and count every single elevation change. Write: "One step, 6 inches, at the front door. No steps after that until the bedroom, which has a 2-inch threshold."
If there's a ramp, give its length and slope if you know it, or at least say whether it's usable without help. "There's a portable ramp over the front step, about 4 feet long" is useful. "Ramp available" is not — available from where, and is someone expected to carry it?
Measure every doorway a guest would actually use
This is the single most-skipped detail, and it's the one that stops a wheelchair user cold if it's wrong. Standard interior doors are often 28 to 30 inches wide, which is too narrow for a lot of wheelchairs and all mobility scooters. A doorway that looks normal to you might be the reason someone can't use your bathroom.
Measure these with a tape measure, not a guess:
- Front door
- Hallway width, if it narrows anywhere
- Bedroom door
- Bathroom door — this one matters most
- Shower or tub entry, if there's a step or lip
Write the actual number: "Bathroom doorway is 32 inches wide. Bedroom doorway is 30 inches." A guest comparing two listings with identical photos will book the one that tells them this.
Describe the bathroom layout, not just that there's a bathroom
"Accessible bathroom" could mean a roll-in shower with grab bars and a raised toilet, or it could mean a regular tub with a bar someone installed in 2004. Describe what's actually there:
- Is it a shower, a tub, or a tub with a shower over it?
- Is there a step into the shower, and how high?
- Are there grab bars, and where — next to the toilet, in the shower, both?
- How high is the toilet seat? Standard height is around 15 inches; ADA-height toilets are usually 17 to 19 inches.
- Is there room to turn a wheelchair around, roughly? A 60-inch diameter is the common benchmark for a full turn, but even "there's about 4 feet of open floor space between the sink and the door" tells a guest more than "spacious."
If your shower has no step and a handheld head, say that plainly: "Walk-in shower, no step, handheld shower head, grab bar mounted on the back wall." That one sentence will get your listing shortlisted by someone who has spent an hour reading listings that don't say any of this.
Note the bed height and the room to get around it
Transferring from a wheelchair to a bed matters more than most hosts think to mention. A bed that's unusually high or low, or pushed against a wall with no clearance on one side, changes whether a guest can use the room at all.
Say something like: "Bed height is about 24 inches. There's 3 feet of clear space on the left side, but the right side is against the wall." That's specific enough for someone to picture the room before they arrive.
Mention anything that's narrower, steeper, or smaller than it looks in photos
Wide-angle lenses make hallways and doorways look roomier than they are. If your hallway narrows to 30 inches at any point, or your kitchen counter is too high for someone seated to reach, say so. Nobody has ever complained that a host gave them too much detail about a doorway.
Same goes for elevators, if you're in a building that has one: cab dimensions, whether the call button is reachable from a seated position, and whether it's ever out of service. "Elevator cab is 4 feet by 5 feet, call buttons at standard height" is a sentence that answers a real question.
Where to put all of this
This kind of detail is too long for the listing description most platforms show by default, and it gets buried if you cram it in with parking and WiFi. Put it in its own clearly labeled section — "Access Details" — so a guest evaluating the property can find it in one scroll instead of hunting through paragraphs about the neighborhood. If you're already building a digital guidebook for check-in and house rules, this is a natural second section to add there, since guests researching a stay are far more likely to read a dedicated page than to dig through a photo caption.
Ask once, then keep the answer
The easiest way to get this information right is to walk through your own space with a tape measure and a notepad, pretending you're seeing it for the first time. Do it once, write it down in plain numbers, and you'll never have to guess again when a guest messages to ask if their wheelchair will fit through the bathroom door.