The $1,000 per hour consultant.

There seems to be a major shortage of consultants who can design accessible hotel rooms and bathrooms that are actually usable.

All of the incompetents currently practicing are, I believe, paid $1,000 per hour for their work which, having memorized the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), they claim to deserve. None of them, however, has ever met a disabled person. The result, in far too many places - including all of the three hotels in which your correspondent has stayed this week, is that the so-called accessible rooms and bathrooms are really hard to get around in.

One example (two of the three hotels) relates to the roll in showers where the seat is at one end of the enclosure and the shower head and faucet (taps) are five feet away at the other end. Is it not obvious that such a separation of guest and shower head is well beyond the reach of any normal person who needs to sit while taking a shower? Then there are shower curtains which fail to prevent massive floods in the rest of the bathroom, bedside lights that cannot be reached by a person sitting in a wheelchair and a myriad of other minor, and not so minor, nuisances.

Every hotel General Manager should immediately telephone the local chapter of the Disabled American Veterans and say this: "if you send me three of your members - one a wheelchair user, one with balance issues who uses a walker, and the other one a leg amputee - I will buy them lunch at the best restaurant in town. In exchange, I would like them to inspect all of our wheelchair accessible rooms and bathrooms and tell us how to make them as easy to use as possible and not just ADA compliant."

That will be the cheapest and most effective consulting any hotel will ever receive. It will likely make the world a significantly better place and, with luck, we will see some of the $1,000 an hour consultants standing in the unemployment line where they belong.