Arkadiusz Świętnicki 🇨🇳 I HAVE MOVEDhey there #blind friends from #europe. Can you tell me what are your experience traveling by air as a blind person? Specificaly: 1. What airline did you fly with? 2. How did you find ordering tickets accessibility-wise. 3. How were your experiences with the assistance on various airports? Any help is deeply appreciated.
Eagle Globe & Flanker@Nuno Lots of good and bad experiences. Airlines are usually fine, I've used Ryanair, Iberia, SAS, British Airways, KLM, Finnair... My only remarkably bad experience is with KLM.
Accessibility for booking: varies a lot, and changes all the time. It's usually possible but sometimes fiddly to get tickets.
Airports: overall good, though a lot of airports insist on me using a wheelchair because it's more comfortable for the person assisting me. Amsterdam was interesting in this regard, they insisted on a wheelchair but they also gave a lot of useful assistance, including getting me to a hotel as I had to stay a night due to a missed connection, and back to the airport on the next day. Lost track of me at Barcelona once and if I hadn't used my cane to find an information point and asked for help I would have missed the flight. Some airports are pretty well organised, some are more chaotic but things still get done. Dublin for example seemed like short of a crisis all the time but things got sorted anyway.
miki@Nuno Big national airlines (LOT / Lufthansa / KLM / British Airways) are much better than the cheap ones, as they fly to the US and therefore need to make their websites compliant with their (far superior) accessibility legislation. This work applies to the whole website, and therefore you will benefit from it even if you’re just flying within Europe. Flying with RyanAir / WizzAir is possible, but some things work better on Mac, some on Windows and some in the iOS app, so be prepared to need access to all three. From my booking experiences from literally a few days ago, RyanAir is only usable on Windows, while WizzAir is much easier to deal with on the Mac. Assistance wise, be sure to request assistance in advance (pick the "needs a walker" option if flying with Ryanair.) Airport assistance is usually fine if you speak the language of the country you're going to, those people often have issues with speaking English. The only exception to the rule I've found so far was Munich, Germany, where some of the staff could very well be confused for Americans if not for their (slight) accents. Also, use GoogleFlights for flight searches, especially if you're considering the cheap airlines.
Talon@miki @Nuno RyanAir's booking process was infuriating as all hell. Their app seems to have improved a little bit since then, but I had to do all the check in and preflight stuff on my phone the last time I flew with them because I didn't have access to a computer and both the website and the app made me want to take my phone and break it in half. I never had issues at the airport except constantly having to remind people that I exist, but that goes for all airlines, not just the cheap european ones. When I flew to the US I forgot to add accessibility needs, but that turned out to not be much of a problem at all except where my guide took too long to show up and I had to be rescheduled, but that was only a two hour wait so I'd say that's acceptable. But the assistant at my destination airport in the US didn't speak any english, so I had a hard time figuring out where we were going. Uh... think I'm going off topic. In general, travelling is very possible if you have patience, and always, always expect things to not go quite as planned. If you're ready for that, you should be able to go almost anywhere even on cheap european airlines.