Meeting the ADA Title III Regulatory changes

Changes made to the ADA Title III regulations for places of lodging require many properties to change portions of their business model to maintain compliance. 

While there are no technology changes required by BookingCenter we have provided the relevant sections of the regulations below, along with recommendations on how properties can meet them.

"NEWRULES FOR LODGING RESERVATIONS UNDER 2010 ADA TITLE III REGULATIONS TOOK EFFECT MARCH 15, 2012

The new Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Title III regulations (the “2010 Regulations”) impose new obligations on owners and operators of hotels, motels, and other places of lodging1 such as rental units in timeshares, vacation communities, and condo-hotels (hereinafter referred to as “places of lodging”) regarding reservations policies, practices, and procedures. See 28 C.F.R. Section 36.302(e). Effective March 15, 2012, an owner, lessor,
lessee, or operator (hereinafter referred to as “owner and operator”) of a place of lodging must, with respect to reservations “made by telephone, in-person, or through a third party”:2

(i) Modify its policies, practices, or procedures to ensure that individuals with disabilities can make reservations for accessible guest rooms during the same hours and in the same manner as individuals who do not need accessible rooms;

(ii) Identify and describe accessible features of the place of lodging and guest rooms offered through its reservations system in enough detail to reasonably permit individuals with disabilities to assess independently whether a given place of lodging or guest room meets his/her accessibility needs;

(iii) Ensure that accessible guest rooms are held for use by individuals with disabilities until all other guest rooms of that type have been rented and the accessible room requested is the only remaining room of that type;"


In order to meet compliance with the new regulations some properties may have to make changes to their current infastructure. These changes are at the discretion of the property and it is the properties sole responsibility to make sure they comply with the ADA Title III regulations.

In order to meet compliance with sections 1 & 3 BookingCenter recommends the following: 

• Move all ADA Compliant rooms in a shared room type to a unique room type. For example if you have 25 TWIN rooms and of that 5 are ADA accessible we recommend moving those five rooms to a new type such as TWINADA or TWIND

• MyPMS customers please see the following Kbase article. This describes the process required when modifying room types, and the same steps apply when moving rooms between types.: https://support.bookingcenter.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/520/0/how-do-i-add-rooms-or-change-existing-rooms-or-room-type

• Next we recommend you consider under allocating to ADA compliant room types to distribution agents such as BC & WR. For example instead of 100% allocation, you may wish to set that to 75%. Under allocating limits the percentage of total availability that can be sold during a single booking enquiry, while still allowing you to sell 100% of your available inventory each day. For Example if you allocate 60% of yoru TWINADA rooms to agent BC, your BookingEngine will still allow all TWINADA rooms to be booked in a single day (if available), but will limit the number of rooms that can be booked by a single booking enquiry to 60% of availability inventory.

In order to meet compliance with sections 2 BookingCenter recommends: Clearly identifiying ADA compliant rooms through the use of room type naming, room type descriptions and room type ammenties.