Travellers World

Travelling with a wheelchair — the good, the bad and the not-a-chance

Category: Getting there

  • Booking rail assistance: what actually happens

    Rail travel in Britain can be genuinely good or genuinely awful, and the difference is rarely the train. It is whether the person with the ramp turns up.

    How the booking works

    The scheme is called Passenger Assist, and it covers every train operator in Britain through one booking. You can arrange it by phone, online, or through the Passenger Assistance app. The required notice period was cut to two hours before travel a few years ago, which was a real improvement — it used to be a full day, which made spontaneous travel impossible.

    You can also simply turn up and ask. Staff are supposed to help on the spot where they can. In practice, at a big staffed station in the middle of the day, turn-up-and-go usually works. At a small unstaffed halt on a Sunday evening, it will not.

    What actually happens on the day

    1. You go to the assistance meeting point, usually near the main ticket barrier, and give your name.
    2. Someone escorts you to the platform and waits with you.
    3. When the train arrives, they put a portable ramp across the gap and you board.
    4. They radio ahead to your destination station, and — this is the important bit — to any station where you change trains.
    5. Someone meets you at the other end with another ramp.

    Four of those five steps are usually fine. Step four is where it breaks.

    What we do to protect ourselves

    • Arrive earlier than they tell you. If they say twenty minutes, we make it thirty. It costs us a coffee and saves us a panic.
    • Get the name of the person who helped you board. If nobody is waiting at the other end, you have somewhere to start.
    • Ask the boarding staff to confirm they have radioed ahead, out loud, in front of you. Not because they are lying, but because saying it makes it real.
    • Avoid tight connections. A twelve-minute change looks fine on paper and is not fine with a ramp involved. We will take an hour’s longer journey for a half-hour buffer every time.
    • Know the guard is your fallback. If you are stuck on a train and nobody has come, find the guard. They can usually get a ramp out themselves.

    If it goes wrong

    Being left on a train past your stop is not a minor inconvenience and you should not treat it as one. Every operator has a complaints process, and failures of booked assistance are taken more seriously than most complaints because they are reported to the regulator. Write it down at the time: train, times, station, what happened. It is worth doing even when you are tired and just want to go home.

    Your turn: if you have experiences of your own — the places that got it right, and the ones that got it badly wrong — tell us in the comments below. Every report helps the next traveller.

  • Flying with a wheelchair: the bit nobody explains

    Flying is the part of travelling we plan hardest, because it is the part where you have the least control. On a train you can wait for the next one. At thirty-five thousand feet, in an aisle chair, you cannot.

    Your rights, briefly

    Assistance at airports is a legal right, not a favour. Airlines and airports must provide it free of charge, and your wheelchair travels free — it does not come out of your baggage allowance. Give the airline at least 48 hours’ notice and they are obliged to arrange it. Give them less and they must still do what they reasonably can.

    Knowing that matters, because you will occasionally meet someone at a desk who talks about it as though it were a kindness they are doing you.

    What to tell them when you book

    • Whether you can walk a short distance, walk a few steps, or not at all. Airlines use codes for this and getting it right determines what turns up for you.
    • The make and model of the wheelchair.
    • Its exact weight and folded dimensions.
    • Whether the battery is wet, gel, or lithium — this one genuinely matters and lithium has extra rules.
    • Whether it folds, and how.

    The bit nobody explains

    You do not stay in your own wheelchair. At the gate you transfer to a narrow aisle chair, and your own chair goes into the hold with the suitcases. This is the moment that worries people most the first time, and reasonably so.

    What we do about it:

    • Photograph the chair from every angle at the gate, with the date visible if you can. If it comes back damaged, you are arguing from evidence rather than memory.
    • Remove anything removable — cushion, footplates, joystick, bag — and take it into the cabin.
    • Tape a laminated card to the chair with handling instructions and your phone number.
    • Ask for it back at the aircraft door, not at baggage reclaim. You are entitled to ask, and at many airports they will do it. Being pushed through a strange airport in someone else’s chair is a miserable way to arrive.
    • Report any damage before you leave the airport. Once you have walked out of the terminal, claims get much harder.

    Onboard

    Most short-haul aircraft do not have an accessible toilet. Long-haul often does, but “accessible” is doing heavy lifting in that sentence. Plan accordingly, and do not let anyone make you feel awkward about it.

    Your turn: if you have experiences of your own — the places that got it right, and the ones that got it badly wrong — tell us in the comments below. Every report helps the next traveller.

  • Taxis and WAVs: booking the ride that actually turns up

    The taxi is the connective tissue of every trip. The train can be perfect and the hotel can be perfect, and the whole day still hinges on an eight-minute ride between the two. It is also the least regulated, least bookable, most variable part of the chain.

    Know the two kinds of accessible taxi

    A WAV — wheelchair accessible vehicle — takes you travelling in the wheelchair, up a rear or side ramp, with the chair strapped down. The other kind is an ordinary car with a driver who is happy to stow a folded chair in the boot while you transfer to the seat. Which one you need is the first thing to say when you ring, because firms constantly send the wrong one. “Wheelchair user” means both things and neither.

    Booking one outside a big city

    In London, every black cab is legally required to be wheelchair accessible, and mostly this works. Outside the big cities, WAVs are scarce, often owned by one or two local firms, and often booked out doing school runs at exactly the times you want to travel — early morning and mid-afternoon. So:

    • Book days ahead, not hours. For a morning train, we book the taxi before we book the train.
    • Avoid 8–9.30am and 2.30–4pm in small towns if you possibly can. That is school contract time and the WAVs vanish.
    • Get the booking confirmed by text or email, with “wheelchair accessible vehicle” written down. A verbal booking for a WAV has a way of becoming a saloon car on the night.
    • Ask the hotel for the local firm they actually use. Receptions know which firm turns up and which one doesn’t.
    • Take the driver’s card when you find a good one. A driver who did it well once will do it well again, and most will take a direct booking.

    In the vehicle

    The driver should strap the chair down at four points and offer the seatbelt. A driver who waves you up the ramp and sets off with the chair loose is not doing you a favour, however friendly he is. It is fine to ask for the straps. It is your neck.

    One more thing worth knowing: a licensed driver cannot legally charge a wheelchair user more than anyone else for the same journey, and refusing the fare because of the wheelchair is, for most drivers, an offence. You will almost never need to say this out loud. It is still worth knowing on the night you do.

    Your turn: if you have experiences of your own — the places that got it right, and the ones that got it badly wrong — tell us in the comments below. Every report helps the next traveller.

  • Ferries and boats: boarding, alighting and the gap

    Boats are strange. A big cross-channel ferry can be one of the most accessible ways to travel in Britain — you drive on, you park, there are lifts, there is space, nobody hurries you. A small tourist boat on a lake can be one of the least accessible things you will ever encounter. The word “ferry” covers both.

    Big ferries: usually good

    On the major routes, things generally work. You book assistance in advance, if you driver you are parked near the lift, and the accessible cabins are properly done. Points to confirm:

    • Ask to be parked on the lift deck. This is the single most useful request and it is usually granted if you ask when booking.
    • Check whether you are allowed to stay in the vehicle during the crossing — on most routes you are not, so you need the lift to work.
    • Ask how many lifts serve the passenger decks. One lift is a single point of failure on a four-hour crossing.
    • Book an accessible cabin early on overnight routes. There are very few and they go first.

    Small boats: ask about the gap

    Here is the thing about boats that catches people out. The tide moves. A gangway that is level at high water can be a one-in-four slope four hours later, and no amount of goodwill from the crew changes the laws of physics.

    So the questions to ask a small operator are:

    • Is there a fixed pontoon that rises and falls with the tide, or a fixed quay wall with steps?
    • At what state of the tide is boarding easiest, and can we book that sailing?
    • Is there a ramp, and how wide is it? Some are narrower than a wheelchair.
    • Once aboard, is there a step down into the cabin? This is very often overlooked and very often a dealbreaker.
    • Is there a toilet on board that we can use? On smaller vessels, frequently not.

    The honest answer we like best

    “I’m sorry, we can’t board a wheelchair safely on this boat.” That is a good answer. It is disappointing, but it is honest, it is safe, and it lets us make a different plan.

    The bad answer is “we’ll manage, we’ll lift you on” from a cheerful crew of two who have not thought it through. Being manhandled over a gap onto a moving deck is how people get hurt. It is entirely reasonable to say no thank you, even when everyone is being kind about it.

    Your turn: if you have experiences of your own — the places that got it right, and the ones that got it badly wrong — tell us in the comments below. Every report helps the next traveller.

  • Motorway services: the stop is part of the journey

    Motorway services are the part of the journey nobody writes about, which is odd, because on a long drive you will spend more time in them than anywhere except the car. For us a services stop is not a pause in the trip. It is one of the legs of it, and it can go wrong in all the usual ways.

    The good news first

    Services are actually one of the more reliably accessible environments in Britain. They are modern, single-level, automatic-doored, and legally obliged to be open to everyone 24 hours a day. Blue badge parking is free (the general two-hour free rule applies to everyone, but badge bays sit closest to the door), and nearly every major services has an accessible toilet. A large and growing number now have a Changing Places facility too — the big room with the hoist and bench — and that is worth planning around.

    Plan the stops like you plan the route

    Our rule: on any drive over two hours, we choose the stop before we leave, rather than taking whichever services appears when someone needs it. Because:

    • The Changing Places map tells you which services have one. If you need it, that decides the stop, full stop.
    • Services vary wildly in distance-from-car-to-door. Some have badge bays right at the entrance; some have them across a lane of moving traffic.
    • The RADAR key comes with us, because accessible toilets at services are sometimes on the key scheme — and occasionally “closed for cleaning” at exactly the wrong moment, at which point the staff can open the second one they usually have.
    • Fuel matters too: some forecourts will send someone out to help you fill up if you can’t get out — there are apps and horn signals for this — but it depends on staffing, so the reliable move is to fuel where a second person can jump out.

    The details that separate good from bad

    • Counter heights. Most food units are fine; ordering screens set high or card readers bolted at standing height are the modern nuisance. Staff will always come round, but you have to catch someone’s eye first.
    • Seating. Fixed benches bolted to fixed tables are everywhere in services, and they are exactly the restaurant booth problem again. Look for the loose chairs; there are always some.
    • The 2.0m height barrier on the “premium” parking nearest the door at some sites. The badge bays are fine, but if they are full, the overflow may not be, if you drive anything tall.

    None of this is difficult. All of it is the difference between a ten-minute stop and a forty-minute one, and on a long travel day those thirty minutes are the margin between arriving fine and arriving done in.

  • Buses and coaches: the ramp, the space, and the lift

    Buses are the transport we use least and rely on most when we do, because a bus is usually the fallback — the train is off, the taxi hasn’t come, the town is the kind where everything else has stopped for the day. So it is worth knowing exactly how the bus is supposed to work, and where it doesn’t.

    Local buses: better than their reputation

    Every full-size local bus in Britain has been required to be accessible for years now: low floor, a powered ramp at the middle or front door, and a wheelchair space. The ramp is deployed by the driver at the push of a button, no booking, no notice. When it works — which is most of the time — it is the most spontaneous accessible transport in the country. Turn up, wave, ride.

    The failure points, so you can see them coming:

    • The ramp doesn’t deploy. They jam, mostly from grit. The driver is supposed to try the manual override; some don’t know it exists. It is fine to ask.
    • The kerb. The ramp needs a kerb of decent height to land on a usable slope. A stop where the bus pulls up on a painted line on flat tarmac gives you a steep ramp; rural stops are the worst for it.
    • The space is occupied. The wheelchair space is legally the wheelchair user’s priority — the courts settled that — and the driver is supposed to require, not just request, that a buggy makes way if it reasonably can. In practice this depends entirely on the driver’s spine. Most of the time it resolves with ordinary politeness.
    • One space per bus. Two wheelchair users travelling together will almost never fit on one bus. We plan around this rather than test it.

    Coaches: a different animal entirely

    Long-distance coaches are high-floor vehicles, and access is by lift, not ramp — where it exists at all. The big scheduled operators run wheelchair-accessible coaches on their main routes, but you must book the space in advance, usually at least a day or two ahead, and confirm whether your chair’s size and weight fit the lift’s limits. Powered chairs press against those limits quickly. This is not a turn-up service and never pretends to be; treat a coach like a flight, not like a bus.

    The question that matters most, because it catches people: “Is the accessible coach guaranteed on my specific departure, and what happens if it is swapped?” Vehicle swaps happen, and a swap to a non-lift coach strands you at the stop with a valid ticket. Get the answer, and the assistance phone number, in writing.

    Our honest ranking

    City bus networks: genuinely good, use them freely. Rural buses: good bones, patchy kerbs, have a plan B. Coaches: workable with planning, but the booking-and-confirmation dance means we usually take the train unless the price difference is silly.

    Tell us below in the comments of any issues you have with buses and coaches

  • LNER, the wheelchair spaces are not spare seats

    Let us start with the compliment, because it is genuine: LNER is our preferred way to travel to London. Over the years they have mostly done the things this site keeps asking train companies to do — the assistance turns up, the staff know their jobs, the journey works. When we have a choice of route, we choose them.

    Which is why this post exists. A policy we only discovered by arguing about it has left us, more than once, unable to travel comfortably or at the times we wanted — and the problem is not rudeness or a broken lift. It is arithmetic.

    What we kept seeing

    On the 12:10 London to Leeds, the wheelchair space — seats 18 and 19 — showed as reserved. No wheelchair arrived. The space held luggage, and the passengers sat in the ordinary seats beside it. On other recent journeys the wheelchair area has been reserved by passengers with crutches, with a pushchair, and once with just luggage. And when we have tried to turn up and go, we have been refused travel because the wheelchair space was in use by a non-wheelchair passenger.

    So Steve asked LNER directly, on X, why able-bodied passengers are able to book the wheelchair space at all.

    The policy, in LNER’s own words

    Credit where due: their social media team engaged properly, over several days. This is the policy as they stated it to us:

    “The seats you are referring to are not solely for the use of wheelchair users — they are for those with reduced mobility and their companions. This means they are open for booking by anyone who contacts the Passenger Assist team and states they require assistance.”

    LNER, via X direct message, February 2026

    They also told us the numbers: two wheelchair spaces on a five-coach Azuma, three on a Mark IV, four on the longer nine- and ten-coach Azumas. And they said this: “we always prioritise passengers using a wheelchair and their companion, if there are any travelling on that service.”

    Hold that last sentence next to being refused turn-up-and-go because the space was occupied by someone without a wheelchair. Prioritisation at booking time is not prioritisation on the platform. Once the space is sold, it is gone — and we are the ones left behind.

    The arithmetic

    A train has two, three or four wheelchair spaces — LNER’s own figures — and ten or more priority seats spread through the carriages. If passengers who can use an ordinary seat are booked into the wheelchair spaces, a handful of spaces absorbs the demand of both groups. One of those groups has somewhere else to sit. The other does not.

    And to be clear about who is saying this: Steve broke his spine in 2014 and has reduced mobility himself. When he travels alone, he books a priority seat — that is what they are for. This is not a complaint about hidden disabilities. It is a complaint about the only two spaces Bev can physically occupy being open to people who have another option, on a train that is roughly one per cent wheelchair-accessible by seat count.

    What it costs us

    • The cheapest trains are usually fully booked for wheelchair spaces — and in our experience, the more expensive the train, the more likely the space is free. The policy quietly prices wheelchair users onto dearer services.
    • Turn-up-and-go has failed us more than once — refused because the space was occupied by a non-wheelchair passenger. LNER themselves acknowledged that some passengers book multiple journeys as a “safety net”; their safety net removes ours.
    • Luggage and pushchairs in the space is, in LNER’s words, “an ongoing issue” — their advice is to speak to the Train Manager, who is responsible for keeping the space clear.

    What LNER say is coming

    LNER told us they are installing more than 36,000 “SeatSense” sensors above every seat and wheelchair space, showing in real time whether each is occupied rather than relying on reservation data. That is genuinely welcome — it should help with the luggage-in-the-space problem and with finding a free space on the day. But a sensor cannot fix the core issue: it can tell you the space is taken; it cannot make the person taking it someone who had no other choice.

    What we would ask LNER to do

    Keep solving the findability problem — but not with the only spaces wheelchair users can occupy. An assistance passenger in an ordinary reserved seat has a coach letter and a seat number; staff know exactly where they are. Meet them at the coach door. Seat them in the priority seats nearest the doors if that helps.

    • Hold the wheelchair spaces for passengers who cannot transfer to any other seat, releasing them only when no wheelchair user can still book that service.
    • At minimum, require evidence — a disabled railcard, or a conversation with Passenger Assist about why the space specifically is needed — before the space can be booked in advance by someone without a wheelchair.
    • Let on-train staff move a non-wheelchair passenger from the space to a priority seat when a wheelchair user needs it — on the day, not just in the booking system.
    • Answer the complaints form. Ours went unanswered until we chased it on social media.

    We say all this as customers who want to keep choosing LNER, and who will happily update this post the day the policy changes — or the day SeatSense proves us wrong.