339 of the 48,517 active French accommodations we hold carry a Tourisme & Handicap mark. That is a labelling rate, not an accessibility rate. Seven tenths of one per cent of French accommodation in our data has been audited under the scheme; the rest has simply never applied. The absence of the mark proves nothing. What the mark's presence tells you, though, is unusually clear-cut — and unusually easy to misread.
Where these numbers come from. France publishes its tourism data through DATAtourisme under the Licence Ouverte 2.0, aggregated from more than a hundred local producers. Tourisme & Handicap is the French state accessibility mark, awarded separately in four categories — moteur (mobility), auditif (hearing), mental (cognitive) and visuel (visual) — after an on-site audit. Of our 48,517 active French records, 339 carry at least one of the four. Every figure on this page was re-derived on 17 August 2026 and is quoted with the denominator it was calculated on.
Why the number is 339 and not 359
Our own working notes recorded 359 of these properties on 15 August 2026. Two days later the identical query returns 339. The twenty that disappeared were not stripped of their mark by the scheme — they were restaurants. All twenty are recorded as food establishments, and all twenty were deactivated in our catalogue on 15 August 2026 in a clean-up that also removed a duplicated listing of the Manoir de Surville at Surville.
This matters beyond arithmetic. Tourisme & Handicap is awarded to restaurants, museums, beaches, cinemas and tourist offices as well as to places to sleep. The national register is therefore far larger than 339 — we hold only the accommodation slice of it, and only the part that reaches DATAtourisme. If you are planning a trip rather than counting a database, the official register is the thing to search, not this number.
All four, or nothing much
The striking thing about the mark is how rarely it comes in halves. 259 of the 339 — 76.4% — hold all four marks simultaneously. Five properties in the whole of France hold exactly one.
The reason is procedural, not architectural. The audit visits the site once and assesses all four categories in the same visit, and the scheme's own guidance pushes applicants towards the full set. A property that has decided to be audited has usually decided to be audited for everything. That is good news for a traveller — but it makes the minority holding only some of the marks far more informative than the majority holding all of them.
Which mark is missing is the whole question
If you have an access requirement, the headline figure is close to useless and the next one is not. Here is how many of the 339 hold each individual mark.
Mobility is the mark most likely to be missing from a three-mark property. Of the 55 properties holding exactly three, 25 hold auditif, mental and visuel but not moteur — more than any other combination. Add the two-mark and one-mark holders and 37 of the 339 do not carry the mobility mark at all. A traveller who sees the Tourisme & Handicap logo on a listing and reads it as step-free access will be wrong about one property in nine.
- Three marks, missing moteur — 25 properties. The single largest partial group, and the one that catches wheelchair users out.
- Three marks, missing visuel — 19 properties.
- Three marks, missing mental — 6. And three marks, missing auditif — 5.
- Two marks — 20 properties, most commonly auditif with mental (9), then moteur with auditif (6), moteur with mental (4), and a single property holding moteur with visuel.
- One mark — 5 properties. Three hold auditif alone; two hold moteur alone. The two mobility-only properties are La Petite Maison du Passage à Niveau at Lhomme in the Sarthe and Gîte du Soleil dans la Ruelle Les Hirondelles at Yvré-l'Évêque.
Where the mark actually is
The 339 sit in 23 départements out of France's 96, and not one is in the overseas départements. This is not a map of where accessible accommodation exists — it is a map of which tourist boards run the scheme and publish it into DATAtourisme.
The concentration is administrative. 110 separate producers supply these 339 records, and the three largest — Orne Tourisme (39), Office de Tourisme Pays Basque (29) and CDT72 in the Sarthe (19) — account for a quarter of the national total between them. Normandy and the Basque Country are not more accessible than Brittany or Alsace; their boards publish the mark and others do not. The label is also thinly spread within départements: no single commune holds more than four marked properties, and Saint-Jean-de-Luz shares that maximum with Saint-Pée-sur-Nivelle and Nanteuil-Auriac-de-Bourzac in the Dordogne.
Three that hold all four marks
Two hotels in Saint-Jean-de-Luz and a campsite at Urrugne, all three audited in all four categories. The cards carry no photograph and no telephone number because DATAtourisme supplies neither for any French property — that is our data, not these businesses. Each has a website, and that is where to start.
How to actually use this
- Search the official register first, not ours. Tourisme & Handicap is the authority on who currently holds the mark, and it covers restaurants and sites as well as accommodation. Our 339 is the accommodation slice that reaches the open-data feed.
- Read the four marks separately. Do not accept the logo as a single fact. Ask which of moteur, auditif, mental and visuel the property holds, and check the answer against the property itself.
- Contact the property before you book, every time. We hold no telephone number for any French property, so use the website. The mark records that a building passed an audit on a date; it cannot tell you whether the specific room you are being sold is the one that passed.
- Do not read the absence of a mark as a refusal. Most French accommodation has never been through the scheme. A gîte with no mark may be entirely suitable and a marked hotel may still not suit you.
- Check the date. The mark is time-limited and has to be renewed. 325 of our 339 records were last updated by their producer in 2026, but eleven date from 2025, two from 2024 and one from 2022.
The mark is awarded per disability category, after an on-site visit, and a property may hold one, two, three or all four. It certifies that the premises were assessed against the scheme's criteria on the day of the audit — not that they will suit every person in that category.
What we don't know
- We cannot tell you whether a property suits you. We hold the fact of a mark and nothing behind it — no door widths, no ramp gradients, no roll-in shower flag, no hearing-loop detail, no lift dimensions. Nothing on this page should be treated as advice about a specific access requirement.
- 339 out of 48,517 is a labelling rate. It measures audits, not buildings. France certainly has far more accessible accommodation than 339 places.
- Four of the 339 rows are duplicates. CHÂTEAU DE LA PLINGUETIÈRE at Saint-Aignan-Grandlieu, Château du Petit Sonnailler at Aurons, La Bergerie at Meyrargues and LA FERME DES HAUTINS at Rieucazé each appear twice under separate record identifiers, so the count of distinct places is nearer 335 than 339. We report the row count because that is what the register contains, and flag the gap rather than silently correcting it.
- Two of the 339 are not accommodation. Two rows are classified as cultural sites; the clean-up that removed the twenty restaurants did not catch them.
- No photographs and no telephone numbers exist for any French record. All 727 photographed French rows in our catalogue come from Wikidata, and not one of those carries a classification — so no French label article can ever illustrate its own subject. The picture at the top of this page is the bay at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, not a certified property, and we would rather say so than show you an unrelated hotel.
- The geography is a publishing map. 23 départements of 96 is a statement about tourist boards. Do not conclude that a département has no accessible accommodation because it has no marked records here.
- We have not visited any of these properties. Everything above is computed from an official register.
Sources
DATAtourisme, the French national tourism data platform, under Licence Ouverte 2.0 (Etalab). The Tourisme & Handicap mark is administered by the French state; the records here were supplied by 110 producers, the largest being Orne Tourisme, Office de Tourisme Pays Basque and CDT72. Retrieved 17 August 2026: 48,517 active French records held, 339 carrying at least one of the four marks, 259 carrying all four. Hero photograph: the bay at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, by Fede2019, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. It shows the town, not a certified property.
More from the same catalogue
- Mont Ventoux by bike: where to stay on each of the three roads — the same register, counted two ways, on a different French mark.
- Where to sleep above 2,000 metres in South Tyrol — the same method on a register that records altitude.
- Every property we hold in Saint-Jean-de-Luz — the destination page behind these counts.
