Travelling while Disabled: Preliminary Reflections
Some Context
Travelling is often hard and stressful. Travelling while disabled involves all sorts of other barriers, points of friction, and uncertainties. Consequently, it can be hard and stressful in different and additional ways.
I've been thinking for a while about recording some of my experiences with travel. I can walk, but get tired quite quickly. Many airports are fairly large, and the amount of walking, often with bags, can tire me out before I reach my destination. I started using airport assistance in Sweden around 10 years ago, after tearing ligaments in my knee at the end of a long post-conference night out. This minor calamity was fortuitous in the long run: it forced me through some—probably pretty ableist—reservations about getting help through airports. Now I get wheelchair assistance. My travel experience has improved a lot since then, since this allows me to conserve energy for the things that I want to do.
That said, I sometimes fall between the gaps where accessibility is concerned. I don't use a chair—either manual or powered—but my walking isn't typical, and I get tired. Most access measures don't really get at what I need, which isn't a chair, but rather occasional transport of some kind, regular breaks, and readily available seating. In general, I usually muddle together a personal system comprised of good planning, public transport, a timetable that accounts for breaks, and (recently) a collapsible stool.
I recently made the longest journey I've taken for around 20 years for a 2-week-long holiday in Seoul. I thought it would be interesting, and possibly helpful, to record some reflections on this trip. Note that this and the following post will comprise less a general story about disability and access in Seoul—though they will include some of that—and more one person's somewhat idiosyncratic experience of this journey.
Dublin and Heathrow Airport
We travelled from Dublin to Incheon Airport via Heathrow, and the same in reverse on the way back. I've had mixed experiences with assistance through Dublin Airport.[1] In general, it has been satisfactory—waiting times have been acceptable, the process seems well-managed, and the assistants have been friendly and helpful—but I've also had a couple of bad encounters.[2] In this case, this leg of the journey was unremarkable: after a short wait, I was brought briskly to the gate, using priority lanes to pass relatively quickly through passport control and security.
At Heathrow, I was met right off the plane by assistance staff. This is what should happen, but there are no guarantees. The meeting point varies depending on whether you're disembarking via stairs or a tunnel; if you're being met by a van, cart, or person with a chair; and crucially, if the assistant is on time, or even shows up [3]. My main point: there is always some uncertainty about whether or not assistance will be seamless. And during travel, uncertainty creates stress.
In this case, all went well. We collected our luggage and progressed to the desk of the airline for the ongoing flight (Asiana Airlines). Their staff told us we had been allocated different seats at the front of our section, with a lot more legroom. I have no idea if this was simple good fortune, or because I had requested assistance. From here until boarding the Incheon flight, my travel companion took over pushing the chair. I mention this because some assistance providers seem to nudge travellers this option, perhaps to have one less job to handle.
Flying from London to Seoul
This flight was as pleasant as any 13 hour flight can be. The extra legroom was nice, but it came at the expense of easy access to the overhead compartment (we weren't allowed to keep bags at our feet). Further, the seats weren't comfortable enough to get decent sleep.
The Asiana cabin crew were extremely polite and helpful. Near the end of the flight, they informed me that they would escort me to assistance upon landing. I found this really positive and reassuring. In my experience, cabin crew don't say anything unless you approach them to ask about the next stage of assistance, and even then, they don't generally have this information at their fingertips. This more engaged approach is welcome and very reassuring.
At Incheon Airport
This assistant also met us right off the plane, and was prompt and polite. He did, however, do one weird and not very welcome thing. Security at Incheon requires that you place fingers from each hand on a scanner concurrently. As I struggled to arrange myself in a way that I could do this, he grabbed my fingers and gamely tried to contort them into a configuration that the scanner could read. This was not appreciated by either me or the scanner. Once he backed off, the operator and I managed to get a reading after a few attempts.
I'll jump forward now to the return trip (I have another post about accessibility in Seoul). When we came back to Incheon, I realised that there is a fairly significant discrepancy between how most European airports handle assistance, and how South Korean ones seem to. In my experience thus far, airport assistance is not managed by the airline, but by the airport (or, in most cases, by a company the airport has contracted to manage assistance). This means that regardless of who you fly with, you go to the same assistance point in the airport, and are assisted by people working for the same company.
Korean airlines appear to handle assistance themselves. I saw some weaknesses of this approach on the return journey. We flew back with Air Korea, whose assistance are was combined with their check-in desks. In fact, the assistance point doubled as a regular desk and bag check. When we proceeded to the disability symbol—as you would do to access assistance—we were told to go to the back of the queue. After a bit of confusion, I returned to the desk to ask why I had been told to queue along with non-assistance passengers. For me, queuing is difficult, and the opposite of accessibility. In addition, I was by now exhausted after 12 days of walking. Staff answered with something like 'I'm sorry, this is just how it is, you need to queue with the others'.
After checking in, we were ushered along to another desk where some wheelchairs were placed. When I made to sit on one, I was told by another staff member that these were for assistance passengers only. After clearing up this further confusion, we were pretty disillusioned by assistance, took the chair, and did the next stage by ourselves. Thankfully, staff at the gate were much more helpful, and gave us priority boarding.
At Heathrow Terminals 2 and 4
I'm skipping the flight from Seoul to London, as it was much the same as before. The regular seats still had reasonable legroom, and now I could keep my bag in the ground as a footrest. As with the outgoing flight, a crew member came over towards the end of the flight to tell me that they would escort me to the waiting assistance. Again, I was reassured.
The reassurance was misplaced. We arrived at Terminal 4, but our flight onwards was from Terminal 2. I was met off the plane and brought to an assistance waypoint, where we were told that while there is a help bus between terminals, there is only one driver, and that they were currently on a break. We had around 90 minutes to get to Terminal 2, drop off our bags, clear security, and go to the gate. Staff didn't provide any estimate of when the bus might be back in action, and instead asked if I could take the Elizabeth Line. This wasn't an option: I was already tired, and we had heavy bags. Above all, I had requested, and thus was justified to expect, assistance. I appreciate that time wasn't ideal, but the problem here was that there was no bus readily available to take us. In the end, we took a taxi which cost around £30.
When we arrived at Terminal 2 assistance, we were told that we should have checked our bags before coming to them. Now one has ever proposed that to me before. I have always gone first to assistance, who then bring me to bag check before going onwards. I told them 'help to drop off bags is part of assistance'. We were by now very frustrated. We took a chair and did the rest of the Heathrow journey ourselves.
Final Thoughts
My main takeaways from these travel experiences are, first, there is huge variation on the quality of assistance that disabled people receive in different airports, and that some assistance still falls below a reasonable standard. I appreciate when staff take time to provide information about the journey, and are patient and friendly when doing so (this isn't always the case). It goes some way towards countering the feeling that you're a parcel being delivered from one place to another. However, while politeness, warmth, and solicitude are well and good, they lack value if the underlying systems don't work. This was the case, in different ways, at Incheon and Heathrow.
Crucially, the variability of assistance means that disabled travellers can never relax when we travel. As I said at the outset, travel is fraught at the best of times. This is amplified by the addition of uncertainty and lack of care. When we have assistance, what is at one moment a smooth travel experience can falter in an instant: someone doesn't turn up, we're made to queue and there are no seats, the bus driver is off, the website information hasn't told us what to expect, assistance staff are distant or unhelpful. And this makes for stress: not just when that disruption occurs, but before it occurs. Travelling when disabled is stressful from start to finish, because we never know if and when that breakdown will happen.
I haven't mentioned every aspect of the journey, only the parts that are worth mentioning. ↩︎
Once, I was left in a pretty grim room somewhere in the bowels of the airport until someone else came to fetch me. This points out a general discrepancy between airport assistance: some airports have multiple assistance points and waiting areas dotted through the airport. This means disabled travellers can, say, get through security and still have a staffed waiting area to use as a base while they wait for their gate to be announced. In good airports, these points are located near cafes, and are in public spaces. On another occasion, no one met me off the plane. I spent some time trying to contact assistance, which turned out to be not easy. The assistance staff member did eventually appear, told me that he had been waiting, and that I had missed him because I exited via the wrong door. Unfortunately for him, I was travelling with someone who exited out that other door, and confirmed that the assistance was not there. ↩︎
I've had numerous no-shows, most recently at Venice Marco Polo last year. ↩︎