My wife and I are both disabled. She is an ambulatory wheelchair user, I walk with a stick. Disability and travel do not mix well in our experience.
We both live with pain and anything physical makes that worse. Travel is particularly challenging. My wife’s annual visit to her family in the USA for a month is at planning a military campaign level of challenging. Indeed, we spend 4-6 months preparing for it. It’s quite exhausting.
I am quite sure that our fellow disabled readers will understand completely but, for the benefit of you lucky able-bodied folks, I will give you some examples of the complexities:
- Dealing with hotels. Do not, under any circumstances, assume that “accessible room” in the description means that it is. Most hotels do not seem to have asked disabled people for input when designing their so-called accessible rooms. A typical example is that they seem to think a lowered bath i.e. one that requires you to step up and in to the shower makes the bathroom accessible. A phone call will always be necessary to clarify. Expect the person you speak to to say something like “Of course our accessible rooms are accessible!” and seem surprised, even vaguely hurt, when you suggest otherwise.
- Some hotels have upgraded rooms. These will often add useful things like a fridge, extra power and USB points etc. . Expect these not to be an option for an accessible room. In fact, when booking online (looking at you Premiere Inn), selecting Accessible hides the upgrades. Disabled people, you see, cannot have/don’t want/cannot afford nice things.
- Motorway services are a nightmare. These are designed with the sole purpose of forcing the visitor to walk past all the retail outlets to get to the bathrooms which are always, without exception, at the very back of what is often a very large building (Cobham Services and South Mimms Services on the M25 in the UK are particularly nasty examples of this).
- Disabled parking. Do not take for granted that this will be close to wherever you’re going, especially at services. Many services have replaced the disabled bays closest to the entrance with charging bays for EVs, FFS! South Mimms did this a few years ago. Making disabled people walk/wheel further is cruel. We don’t matter you see. We are ‘other’, ‘lesser’.
- Expect to pay more for parking at the airport. It typically takes much longer to load or unload a vehicle as disabled people. More so when a wheelchair and hoist are in the mix – which we have. With airports now charging £3,500/second (Yes, SIlverdrop has told me at least a million times not to exaggerate) for parking, this can add significantly to to the bill.
- We cannot afford fancy hotels. We typically use Premiere Inn as their accessible rooms are predictable. However, in these days of skeleton staff, do not expect there to be anybody to help you. There will be no porter you can tip to assist with your luggage, for example. Our experience is that the staff are usually pleasant enough. It’s just that they are run off their feet and unable to help. This causes us to expend more physical effort, which = more pain.
- The airport experience will usually be awful. If you can get Special Assistance to help, things will go relatively smoothly. But these people (who have always been lovely individuals in our experience) are usually ‘zero hours’, minimum hourly rate, on-demand workers, and the bean counters in charge rarely call enough of them in to on any given day to cover the needs of the disabled. This can only be cost saving, as Special Assistance should be booked in advance of travel. It’s free, but they need to plan the staff. Yet, on one particularly unpleasant occasion, my wife was left waiting more than an hour because a ‘plane landed with 12 wheelchair users on board and there weren’t enough staff. I couldn’t get to her because she was on the wrong side of Passport Control.
- Wheelchair users and others who need assistance complain – and rightly so – of being treated like cattle. At Special Assistance check in, you will often then sit in a cordoned-off area (known by the disabled as a “cattle pen”, while you wait for someone to take you through security. There you will be deposited in another pen, usually well away from bathrooms and food places (don’t want the able-bodied to get upset by seeing the cripples) to wait for someone else to push you to the gate.
- Baggage handlers don’t seem to give a fuck about your wheelchair or other equipment. They broke one of the main structural members on my wife’s chair three years ago, rendering it useless. It took three months to get compensation from the airline for that. It happens regularly – Google it. This years she’s traveling with a £3k power chair, so we’re worried.
- Which brings me to airline-approved power chairs. Do not expect that having one of these will guarantee you get to travel with it. Legally, it is always at the pilot’s discretion. Google it, you will find examples of this happening.
I’ll stop ranting now. I am tired, upset and angry just from typing what is just a small part of our lived experience as disabled people trying to travel.
Header image: cottonbro studio via Pexels.
