Airbnb buys Accomable, a startup that helps you find disability-friendly rentals

Airbnb just bought a London-based Accomable to provide more disability-friendly listings to customers. The deal includes adding to the Airbnb website Accomable’s roughly 1,100 house and apartment listings that can accommodate guests with physical disabilities. Airbnb declined to disclose the price and terms of the deal.
Airbnb said it will add features so home owners can detail in their listings whether their homes have stairs or an elevator, doorways and bathrooms wide enough to fit a wheelchair and showers with handlebars or a chair.

On its website, Srin, Accomable CEO & co-founder, made the following statement on their website:

“Dear Accomable community,

Today marks the start of an exciting and historic new chapter in our mission to make travel accessible for disabled people around the world. I am delighted to announce that the Accomable team and myself will be joining the Airbnb family to share our unique knowledge and expertise to make one of the world’s largest travel communities more accessible, and to enable Airbnb to fulfil its mission to create a world where anyone can truly belong anywhere.

I launched Accomable with my childhood friend, Martyn, a little over two years ago in simple beginnings. Back in early 2015, I was still learning to code and the Accomable journey was started with a basic web app that I hacked together in my bedroom over a caffeine-fuelled three weeks. Accomable started less as a company or a product but more as a mission and a dream. A mission to open up travel and adventure to hundreds of millions of disabled people; and a dream that one day, I, as a disabled person could travel the world just like everybody else…”

Accomable was founded in the summer of 2015, by Srin Madipalli and Martyn Sibley – two childhood friends with Spinal Muscular Atrophy who have travelled all over the world. Frustrated by the difficulty of finding accessible places to stay and reliable information, Accomable was created to make it easier for everyone to travel, regardless of disability.