Rolling Traveler

It may seem obvious, but it still bears repeating: when you are traveling with a wheelchair, or indeed with any of the extra issues I mentioned yesterday, let the airline, rail carrier or coach company know in advance. You would be surprised how many people don’t, and while it is rare that this leads to them missing their flight or train, it can happen.

Now, you may have heard that an airline can’t refuse you boarding on the grounds that you didn’t inform them in advance, but all the ground crew that I have spoken to have said the same thing: if you arrive one hour before your departure time with no advance warning of traveling with a wheelchair and needing assistance, they might not be able to get you on board without delaying the plane. In smaller airports, it may be an issue of not enough staff, while in larger hubs like London Heathrow and Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, it may be a question of not being able to requisition the required transport in time.

With intercity trains, you might think that there really is no need to inform anyone. After all, can’t you just get onto the platform by elevator, and then straight onto the train? Well, that depends on the country you are in and the model of train. In Germany, for example, even in large cities, not all the platforms have been made accessible by public elevator; you need a staff member to take you up and down in a freight elevator. Furthermore, depending on the type of train, you may not be able to get on board without assistance. The German local trains are level with the standard platforms, but all the longer-distance trains like the Regional Express and Inter-City Express have steps.

With long-distance coaches, the situation is even more complicated, and it is one I will get into in a later post. Not all coach companies in the world will take unaccompanied wheelchair passengers, and some will not take accompanied wheelchair passengers. Trying to travel without checking this well in advance would be foolhardy.

Unfortunately, letting the airline or other carrier know that you are coming is not always as straightforward as it should be. If you’re buying tickets in person, obviously you can just let the person know to add the correct notation to the booking, but if you’re purchasing tickets online, it can be quite a procedure to let them know about your particular needs.

To check that nothing has changed yet, just now I looked at the web sites for eight major airlines: American Airlines, United Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, British Airways, Lufthansa, Scandinavian Airlines, Air France and Quantas. On each site, I made a booking (without actually going through the payment step), carefully checking at what point in the process I would be able to notify them that I wanted to travel with a wheelchair. The only common feature I found was that none of these airlines had a check-box or rubric for entering the information over the Internet: they all require that you call the information in. Finding the phone number is usually easy enough, but it was quite a feat in a couple of cases, with more than a little ingenuity required.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll go into more detail on how to let the various carriers know you’re traveling with a wheelchair, but also draw your attention to some of the inherent unfairness in the current system. You see, while we really do need to let the airlines and rail carriers let them know we’re coming, for both sides’ benefit, sometimes we are also being made to pay for it.

Till tomorrow!

Derek.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS