You have made it to your destination, but things here are not designed to meet the needs of your autistic children. This section details specific and easy changes you can make to most spaces to accommodate the individual needs of your child.

Our home is set-up as autism-friendly as we can possibly make it (and that has taken years to accomplish), but hotels and holiday houses are just not made or designed with these needs in mind. Here are a few strategies that we have learned along the way.

Doors and Windows

Is your autistic child a runner? Our T is and we have had too many scary incidences with him getting away from us and disappearing. This would be extra terrifying in a strange place. Hotels and holiday houses focus on securing the premise from the outside in (i.e., keeping out intruders), but rarely, do they think of keeping guests secured inside. Once we were staying in a very nice holiday house, but the boys’ bedroom was on the second floor, and I went in to check on them 10 minutes after putting them to bed and found the three of them sitting on the windowsill of an open second story window. It was after this experience that we started looking for solutions for internal security. This is one of the easiest and cheapest solutions that we have found for both window and sliding doors.