Hotels 'should offer family rooms for wheelchair users'

Lizzy Simms and Buzby Allen with their daughter Darcey

A woman has called for hotels to be more accommodating for families with a wheelchair user.

When Lizzy Simms, 44, and her partner Buzby Allen travel with their two children, they have often struggled to find an accessible room for a family of four.

Mr Allen, 64, has limited mobility and has used a wheelchair since experiencing a bleed on the brain last year.

Ms Simms, from Hopton, Norfolk, said hotel chains acted as though when someone got a wheelchair, "your children magically disappear”.

Buzby Allen and Lizzy Simms, pictured with Conner and Darcey, have had problems finding suitable rooms.

The family want hotels to provide rooms to enable children with a disabled parent "the chance to get away, like everyone else".

Ms Simms has started a petition calling for hotels to be obliged to offer accessible rooms for families.

"What we are asking for really isn’t that much. It’s a wetroom and wider doorways," she told BBC Radio Norfolk.

Kimberley Myhill, from Equal Lives, a disability rights organisation, said: “There is an assumption that disabled people don’t have money to spend.”

She said wheelchair users often did not stay at hotels due to accessibility issues.