Comment from ELIZABETH GALL

I am strongly in favor of more protections for passengers using wheelchairs in airports and on passenger planes. As a disabled person who has used airport wheelchair services several times, I have often felt invisible, overlooked, and disrespected by the wheelchair assignment system and by gate agents.

To illustrate the need for expanded rights for passengers with disabilities, I would like to share an experience I had on December 21, 2022. My husband and I were traveling to visit family for the winter holidays and I had ordered a wheelchair to take me to the gate at our starting airport, then from the gate to bag claim at our destination, Denver International Airport.

Due to winter storms, our flight had been delayed, but we did make it to Denver. However, the wheelchair I had ordered was not waiting when the other passengers had finished deplaning.

My husband helped me get up the jet bridge and we asked the gate agent to call and see what was going on with the wheelchair service. The gate agent informed us that since the wheelchair agents are private contractors, he had no information for us and could not call the desk on our behalf.

I went to the DIA website on my phone and tried to reach the wheelchair dispatch desk, only to find that there was no number for it. Instead, the website advised contacting your airline for wheelchair reservations. The airline website (Delta) had only one piece of information on wheelchair access - an FAQ page that said you could book wheelchair assistance when you buy your ticket, which I had already done. There was no number to call, or even an email address, specific to issues with wheelchair assistance. With the holidays and seasonal delays, we knew that calling the general customer service line would get us nowhere fast.

Having found that there is no publicly available method to contact DIA's wheelchair dispatch, we again asked the gate agent to call the dispatch for us. When he called, the wheelchair dispatcher said that the wheelchair I ordered had already been dispatched... at the time our flight was originally scheduled to arrive.

Our flight had been delayed, but my wheelchair had been "on time." My reserved wheelchair had come and gone without me.

To get a wheelchair now, I had to file a brand new request. This placed me at the bottom of the queue during the busiest flying season of the year, even though I had done everything in my power to reserve the assistance I needed well ahead of time. The dispatch agent said he had no way to estimate how long it would take the to get the wheelchair to me.

My husband started going up to every wheelchair assistance employee with an empty chair who passed the gate, asking if they were returning to the terminal and could take me. The first three refused because they were not supposed to take clients who had not been assigned to them by the dispatch desk. The fourth agent my husband stopped said he could indeed take us. He called the dispatcher, got himself assigned to my request, and took me to baggage claim.

I secured my supposedly reserved wheelchair two full hours after our flight landed.

This exhausting, dehumanizing experience demonstrates the horrible current standards airlines and airports are held to with regards to wheelchair service. I did everything right, but due to a careless mistake, my husband and I had to wait for two stressful hours before we could even get back to the baggage claim area. Though we appealed to help from gate agents, the airport website, the airline website, and the wheelchair contractor's own dispatcher, we had to go around the system to receive the service I needed.

The brief text conversation I had with a disabled friend at the time demonstrates that the minimizing and disrespectful experience I've described is typical. When I told her how long we had been waiting for the wheelchair, she pretended to chastise me for expecting better service, saying, "Disabled people don't matter, remember?" (I have attached a screenshot of this chat.)

There need to be clear and enforceable standards to protect disabled travelers on flights and at airports. There need to be fully staffed, publicly available contact numbers for wheelchair dispatchers. There needs to be a system that ties wheelchair reservations to the actual traveler, not a rigid timetable. There needs to be communication between the airline agents, airport agents, contractors, and customers so that if a problem arises, it can be solved quickly and efficiently - and disabled customers are not repeatedly denied by people who actually do have the ability to help (like the gate agent who could absolutely have called wheelchair dispatch or the wheelchair agents who could have gotten themselves assigned to a customer in need).

Thank you very much for your consideration.

Comment Date:2024-04-23T04:00:00Z

Comment On Document ID:DOT-OST-2022-0144-1122

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