“Hotels Offering Free Rooms to Cancer Patients”

Hotels Offering Free Rooms to Cancer Patients

Posted: 26 Jul 2010 03:25 PM PDT

Kristen Guilfoos
NewsChannel 10

Amarillo, Texas - Hotels in Amarillo are working to ease the financial burden of having cancer. In some cases, cancer costs can easily climb well past $100,000.

But for many here in the Panhandle, you have to tack on an extra expense... traveling to Amarillo, and paying to stay somewhere when you get here.

Since the cancer centers here are pretty much the only option for outlying areas, they have no choice but to make the trip.

Ryan Parnell with Harrington Cancer Center says, "We have patients that come to us from as far south as Plainview, all the way up to the Guymon area. We serve the full 26 counties of the Panhandle, plus Southeast Kansas and Western Oklahoma."

25 Amarillo hotels are coming together to provide those people with free rooms while they're in town seeing doctors or getting treatments. As long as they've traveled farther than 50 miles, the hotel room is there for as long as they need it.

It's a brand new effort put together by the Panhandle Hotel and Lodging Association, along with the American Cancer Society.

For more information, you can log onto www.cancer.org.

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