ADA Parking for Oregon Hotels & Motels

Lodging Parking Serves Guests Who Stay

A hotel or motel parking lot is different from a retail lot in one fundamental way: the guests stay. They arrive with luggage, they park overnight, and they need to get from their vehicle to their room, sometimes carrying or rolling everything they brought. For a guest with a disability, that whole sequence, park, unload, route to room, has to work. That makes accessible parking at a lodging property part of the guest experience from the first moment.

This page covers ADA parking for Oregon hotels and motels, where the standard count applies but van loading, bus access, and accessible EV charging add lodging-specific wrinkles. The general standard is in our ADA parking compliance guide for Oregon.

The Count for a Lodging Lot

Hotel and motel parking follows the standard accessible-parking count table: the requirement scales with total parking provided, roughly one accessible space per 25 total up to 1,000, with at least one in six being van-accessible. Our accessible parking count requirements page has the full table.

A related but separate requirement governs accessible guest rooms, the count of which scales with the number of rooms. While the accessible-room count and the accessible-parking count are calculated independently, they work together in practice: a guest in an accessible room needs an accessible space and a route to that room. Placing accessible parking near the wings or entrances that serve accessible rooms is what ties the two together.

Van and Bus Loading

Lodging properties see more van and bus traffic than most businesses. Guests arrive in wheelchair-equipped vans, paratransit vehicles, and tour or shuttle buses. The van-accessible spaces, with their wider 8-foot access aisle and 96-inch vertical clearance, matter here, as our van-accessible spaces in Oregon page explains.

Two practical points for hotels:

• Covered entries and porte-cochères. Hotels often have a covered drop-off at the entrance. The 96-inch vertical clearance for van routes means that covered area, and the route a van travels to reach it, has to maintain clearance. A low canopy that blocks a wheelchair van defeats the accessible drop-off.
• Bus and shuttle staging. Where the property hosts tour buses or runs an airport shuttle, the staging area should be located so it does not block accessible spaces, aisles, or the route to the entrance.

The Route With Luggage

The accessible route at a hotel carries a heavier practical load than at most businesses, because guests travel it with luggage. A route that technically meets width and slope but forces a guest over a threshold, up a step, or across a long gravel stretch is a poor experience for anyone and a barrier for a guest with a disability. The route from the accessible space to the lobby, and from parking to the accessible-room wings, should be continuous, smooth, and within slope limits.

Sprawling motel layouts, where rooms open directly onto the parking lot, put the route front and center: the accessible space and the path to the accessible room's door are essentially the same short trip, and it has to be flat, firm, and unobstructed.

Accessible EV Charging

Lodging is one of the fastest-growing settings for EV charging, because guests want to charge overnight. As hotels add EV stations, accessibility guidance for those stalls comes into play. The general principle from recent accessibility guidance is that EV charging stalls should be served by accessible features, an access aisle and a route to the charger, so a person using a wheelchair can actually use the charger, and that adding EV stalls should not reduce the count of accessible parking spaces.

For a hotel installing chargers, that means planning the EV stalls and the accessible parking together, so at least some charging is reachable for guests with disabilities. Our accessible EV charging stalls page covers the emerging requirements in detail.

Hospitality Is the Standard

Hotels live on reviews and repeat guests, and accessibility shows up in both. A guest who cannot get from the lot to their room without a struggle remembers it, and so does the next traveler who reads about it. Compliant, well-placed accessible parking, with van loading that works, a clear route, and accessible charging, is hospitality applied to the parking lot.

This is general guidance, and your property's specific count, room ratios, van loading, and charging plans should be confirmed on a site survey, since lodging layouts vary widely from urban high-rises to spread-out motels.