Creating a fairer Britain
Zara Jurenko is 21 years old. She is a champion tennis player who won a gold medal in the Ladies Singles at the Special Olympics in Shanghai last year. She works as a trainer in a fashionable gym in central Leicester. She has a learning disability and has moderate difficulties with reading and writing.
Last month, she flew to Australia to see her best friend Charlotte. They were to stay with Charlotte’s parents and spend two weeks swimming, shopping and site seeing. ‘I've always wanted to go to Australia,’ Zara says. ‘It has beaches. It has shops’.
Zara’s mother Gillian booked the flight. She immediately explained to the travel company that Zara would need special assistance at the airport terminal. She would need to be escorted from passport control to the departure gate, both on the way to and the way back from Australia, to ensure she caught her flights. ‘I prefer to have someone with me at the airport, someone to take me through,’ Zara says. The travel company agreed and the booking was made on those terms.
But when Zara and Gillian arrived at the airport, the agreement was not honoured. When they approached the check-in desk, they were told that the ‘meet and assist’ service was no longer available. There had been a breakdown in communications between the travel company and the airline, and Zara was caught by surprise in the middle.
A new law was introduced in July 2008, to ensure that all passengers with mobility problems of any kind – including learning disabilities - were entitled to be assisted. But in this case, the new legislation had not yet trickled down to where it matters - the terminal. And so the airline representative explained that if Zara was in a wheelchair, or visually impaired, or hearing impaired, she would be entitled to receive assistance. But Zara is none of those things, and so they wouldn’t help her. ‘They couldn’t see it,’ Zara says, ‘That is why they thought I did not need help. It is from the inside, which is why you can’t tell it from the outside’.
Gillian takes up the story. ‘I told them, "We booked the ticket on the basis that you would help Zara"’, she says and describes how a queue of surprised travellers stared at them, as they tried to explain to the airline representative why Zara needed help. None was forthcoming. ‘We just burst into tears,’ she says. ‘Zara was as white as a sheet’. ‘When under stress’, Gillian adds, ‘Zara develops stomach pains. She was becoming ill.’
So how would Zara get to Australia? A manager from the airline suggested a bitter compromise. If Zara agreed to travel as an unaccompanied minor, they would assist her in travelling through the airport. Zara is a fully-grown woman. But because she recognised that this was her only chance of travelling to Australia in safety, she agreed. ‘The only way I could get special assistance was if someone treated me as a child,’ she says. ‘We had to accept it,’ adds Gillian, ‘although reluctantly. I was annoyed but I had to bite my tongue’. There is normally a fee for an unaccompanied minor. In this case, the airline waived it.
So Zara was escorted through the airport and signed for as a child every time she was passed from person to person. How did she feel about that? ‘I would have preferred to travel as a person with learning disabilities, rather than as a child,’ she says. The whole experience was humiliating and irritating for her. The window seat she had chosen ‘because I like to look out of the window’ was no longer available to her, because accompanied minors have to sit in a certain place on the aeroplane. Although she adds, with a small smile, that a kind gentleman noticed what had happened, and insisted she have his window seat. Airline staff kept asking her if she was all right - she felt conspicuous. ‘It was a big shadow over my holiday,’ she says. When she reached her destination, she was signed for again. ‘They thought I was thirteen,’ she says.
With Zara on her way to Australia, Gillian rang the Equality and Human Rights Commission. She asked them to contact the airline, to make sure they knew the law, and to ensure that Zara would be safe on the return flight. ‘It was really a matter of some urgency,’ she says, ‘because I had to think about how we were going to get Zara back from Australia’. The Commission’s response was swift and direct because of the circumstances. ‘They said they would contact the airline and remind them of their responsibilities to Zara,’ she says.
The Commission contacted the airline, and reiterated the new law, and reminded them of these grave responsibilities. The airline responded and abided by the law.
For the return journey back to England, Zara was given a card to identify her need for special assistance. She was not moved from her desired window seat on the flight. The plane was redirected from a Singapore stop-off to Bangkok at the last minute, but the airline offered special assistance to Zara and ensured that she returned home safely. They have written a formal letter of apology to Zara and have offered compensation for her distress and inconvenience, which she is considering accepting.
Thanks to writer Tanya Gold