A hotel that is fine for a business trip can be a bad place to spend two weeks in treatment, and the differences are not obvious from a booking site. This is what to look for, in the order it actually matters to the person staying there.
Nothing else on this list comes close. A patient going in for a 7am appointment, or coming back after a procedure, is not going to walk a mile, and a fifteen-minute drive means either a hire car, a taxi twice a day, or a family member driving who has also been up since five.
The number to look at is not miles on a map, it is what the journey is actually like at seven in the morning and at four in the afternoon. Something walkable in five minutes is a different kind of stay from something two miles away, in a way that no measure of hotel quality compensates for.
This is the second thing and it is not really about money, though eating out twice a day for two weeks is a serious expense. It is about control. Treatment changes what somebody can eat and when, sometimes at short notice, and a room with a fridge and a hob turns that from a daily problem into a non-issue.
It also matters for the specific case of a patient who needs to eat at an odd hour, or who cannot face a restaurant, or who has dietary restrictions that a hotel breakfast will not accommodate. Extended-stay brands exist for exactly this and they are usually the right answer for a longer protocol.
Most patients travelling for treatment are not travelling alone, and the second person is usually a parent, spouse or adult child who is also the driver, the note-taker and the one managing everything else.
A room with one bed serves a couple adequately and serves a parent and an adult child or a patient and a friend very badly. If your program does not know which shape its patients travel in, two beds is the safer default, because it works for everybody and costs little.
Past about a week, a different set of things starts to dominate, and they are the ones nobody thinks about when booking for three nights.
Accessible rooms are limited in number, allocated on request, and frequently released if a booking is not flagged. A patient who will be on crutches, using a walker, or recovering from abdominal surgery has needs that a standard room may not meet, and roll-in showers are scarce.
The practical advice for a program is to say on the page that accessibility needs should be raised at booking rather than at check-in, because by check-in the room is gone.
Star rating, brand loyalty and breakfast are the three things hotel lists tend to lead with and the three that matter least to somebody in treatment. A four-star hotel a mile away is worse than a three-star across the road for almost every patient making this trip.
The reason this is worth saying out loud is that most lodging lists are implicitly sorted by hotel quality, because that is how hotels are usually compared. Sorted by distance and stay-suitability, the same list often looks quite different.
Walkable is the meaningful threshold, and it is about the walk rather than the distance: five to ten minutes on a flat, safe, well-lit route. Past that you are into transport, and transport is a daily cost and a daily logistical problem for somebody who has enough of both.
For stays over about three nights, usually, because of the kitchen and the laundry. For one or two nights the advantage mostly disappears and proximity should win.
Recommend, but show why. A patient has no way to judge which of six hotels suits a two-week protocol, and an unexplained list pushes a decision onto somebody with the least information and the most on their mind.
It matters enormously to the family, and it is the reason to be careful about recommending on quality alone. What is worth avoiding is a list that optimises for the cheapest room without saying it is two miles away with no kitchen, because that trade is being made on the patient's behalf without telling them.