Air travel is hellish right now. Flights are expensive, there are constant delays and cancellations, and airports are crowded af. As individuals, we don’t have much control over this unfortunate bouquet of inconveniences, so everyone is looking for ways to make summer travel easier. But some people are taking it way too far by apparently requesting wheelchair services that they don’t need in order to skip lines. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but this TikTok trend is not a legitimate travel hack, and disabled people are clapping back.
This particularly egregious travel trend has been making headlines lately, thanks in part to the CEO of London’s Heathrow Airport, John Holland-Kaye, blaming the recent airport chaos on people faking injuries. “People are using the wheelchair support to try to get fast-tracked through the airport,” Holland-Kaye told LBC, a British news outlet. While this is a grossly transparent — and inaccurate — way to try to shift blame onto passengers, it’s true that using airport workers’s valuable time in this deceitful way can’t be helping. Holland-Kaye’s corporate gaslighting maneuver does shed light on just how disruptive entitled behavior can be, and disabled TikTokers are speaking up.
