No I wasn't referring to the famous movie by Clint Eastwood. I was referring to my impressions when I visited the new Royale Bintang Hotel of Penang on Jan 7, 2015.
The good thing about this hotel is that there were attempts to make the premise wheelchair friendly. It has a step-ramp at the main entrance. And I had no problem moving around inside the hotel. (See photos below.)
The bad thing is the hotel's accessible toilet. When I entered the toilet I was very surprised to see that the toilet floor is about 15 mm lower than the floor outside. That posed a problem when I wanted to leave the toilet. The small wheels in front of my wheelchair were unable to overcome the 15 mm height step. I had to reverse my wheelchair and exit back to front. (See photo below.)
The grab bar in the toilet was fixed in a wrong direction. I cannot understand how the designer could make such a fundamental error I really could not understand. (See photo below.) (Please refer to my post about designing an accessible toilet if you want to know how grab-bars should be fixed. The link is HERE.)
And what is the ugly thing -- keeping cleaning equipment in the accessible toilet. Imagine a foreign visitor entering the toilet. What will he or she thinks of this hotel or even Penang. Can't the hotel allocate a dedicated room for such storage and not use the accessible toilet to store such stuff.
Classic mistakes, unfortunately! It's always good to point these out but why, indeed, does cleaning equipment so often get forgotten when new buildings are designed? Perhaps because some architects have never learnt to clean when they were young? Or is that too harsh?
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