Finding accessible vacation homes had often been a challenge for Lorraine Woodward who has muscular dystrophy along with her two sons. Not wanting other families to miss out on vacations, Woodward launched a website called Becoming rentABLE.
The website features short-term rental homes tailored to people with disabilities where accessible features are confirmed. The goal, as described on the company’s website, aims to create “a future where accessible short-term rentals are the standard, not the exception.”
“We want everyone to have the opportunity to travel,” said Woodward, 64, of Raleigh, North Carolina who is a wheelchair user.
When she launched her business Becoming rentABLE five years ago, it was intended to make travel easier for people with disabilities by helping them find short-term vacation rentals.
Becoming rentABLE lists more than 1,200 properties across the United States and Canada, including several lodgings in New York City. The listed homes have 63 different features, such as 36-inch doors, lower light switches, elevated toilets and hard-surface driveways. Woodward said she is expanding her business to accommodate people with hearing and sight loss in addition to cognitive disorders.
“Accessibility is more than wheelchairs,” she said. “We look at needs for people with crutches, walkers and cognitive disabilities like autism, dementia, depression and anxiety.”
“When you come to our site looking for an accessible place to stay, you identify your needs. They’re all different,” she continued. “You might need a hard‑surface driveway, a short ramp, grab bars in the bathroom or a property with a swimming pool.”
A common misunderstanding, according to Woodward, is that it costs more to rent a property with accessibility features. “It’s not necessarily more expensive,” she said.
Every home on Becoming rentABLE is verified by a paid team that examines the infrastructure. “I decided not to work alone,” Woodward said. “I brought together volunteers — 21 in total — for the first two years. Now I have paid team members.”
“It’s not something AI can do,” she said. “A human needs to look at the images submitted and validate what a property owner lists as accessible. Technology helps us organize the information, but verification is manual.”
Bernadette Scarduzio, of Pennsylvania, is one of the company’s travel ambassadors and enjoys showing other travelers accessibility features of properties. She also works for the Hereditary Neuropathy Foundation (HNF) to raise awareness and funding for the Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) community.
As a person living with CMT, she wished this service had existed years ago. She said she would rent a vacation place that was advertised as accessible, but it could not accommodate her when she arrived.
“I wasn’t just stressful for me, but for everybody that was with me,” she said. “But with Becoming rentABLE, they’re very clear … and like I feel like everything’s clear and there’s no surprises.”
Woodward said that there is a critical undersupply of accessible rentals in North America. “The short‑term rental industry also needs to change. Platforms like VRBO have filters, but they’re vague — ‘wide doors, wheelchair accessible.’ What does ‘wide’ mean? Thirty-two inches? Thirty-six?”
According to Woodward, many people give up and think they can’t travel.
“To create global change, we need industry‑wide filter improvements and better education,” she said.
With reporting by Yasmin Bardales, May Bar and Joie Tyrrell.
Angie Larrea, Hempstead High School, and Gregory Valestin, Brooklyn Technical High School, are part of Stony Brook University’s Robert W. Greene Summer Institute for high school journalists. The Institute has been training the next generation of professional journalists since 2009.