Virgin Hotels scores gold on accessibility

Virgin Hotels are now using a fantastic new service on their website, which allows people to easily see a hotel’s accessibility features upfront and gives them a rating. 

Virgin Hotels got a gold score and I’m glad that the magic of Virgin Hotels is accessible to all.

The service provider Mobility Mojo was co-founded by the wonderful Stephen Cluskey. I met Stephen in Dublin last year as he came along to watch his brother James, my former tennis coach on Necker, give me a lesson. He told me how he was left paralysed from the neck down after falling off a hay bale at the age of 18, and that this new perspective inspired a business which is on course to solve a significant problem for millions of people across the world. 

One of his biggest challenges, faced by anyone with accessibility needs, is finding real and trusted information on the accessibility of hotels when travelling.

He told me there are more than a billion people globally with a disability, and that more than 50% of these people choose not to travel because of a lack of information on accessibility.

With an increasing ageing population, this figure is only going to grow.

Stephen said he could spend hours online or on the phone trying to find out if a room had the accessible features he needed, and that almost every hotel group in the world was under-delivering in this area. What’s more, even if a hotel had excellent accessibility, they rarely mentioned or promoted this fact. 

This led him and his co-founder Noelle Daly to develop Mobility Mojo, a tool which hotels can easily embed into their website to show all the accessibility features they offer. Stephen embodies the true essence of entrepreneurship – seeing a problem or having a frustration and working hard to find a world-class solution, and to make people’s lives better in the process.

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