Former Alaska customer service rep/trainer here:
If you have an electric chair, confirm that they’re NOT going to carry it down the jetway stairs.
They need to drive it to the elevator (this means they might need a 10second tutorial on how to turn it on). But it takes longer to get someone who has access to drive it to the elevator and instead, the baggage crew invariably tries “save time” and manhandle it down those steep, sharp stairs at the back of the jetway and this is how shit gets busted-up and outright broken. Remind the gate agent that your chair needs to go to the elevator to get down to the tarmac.
Quick tutorial: anymore, the baggage crew almost never works directly for the airline. They’re pretty much all contract companies. Meaning, they don’t report to the same people that your gate agents do. They don’t get the same training and the job is so hard that an enormous number of people quit during the week of initial training. I seldom met a ground crew member who actually knew they weren’t supposed to use the stairs.
So it is crucial that the *gate agent* knows and is enforcing the loading policy.
There is little to no contact between the gate agents and the baggage handlers unless we specifically run them down to tell them something (we couldn’t just call them, we had to go physically find them) and it can be difficult to find someone senior enough to help once boarding has begun, so I recommend touching base with your gate agent about it before boarding begins, when possible.
At least on Alaska, it was expressly forbidden for baggage handlers to carry electric wheelchairs down the stairs and it still happened all the goddamn time. If you have to, remind the gate agent that the airline is 100% liable for any damage done to a mobility device. This is true (and also an enormous pain in the ass for you) and sometimes may strike fear into the hearts of a reluctant (read: shitty) agent.
If they cannot/will not confirm, or just seem to deflect or dodge the question, don’t get out of your chair. Sit right there in the bottom of the jetway and tell them that you’ll wait until the crew supervisor arrives with the elevator key (this was always this issue, most of the ground crew didn’t have access so they needed a crew supervisor or an actual airline manager) to surrender your chair. They will probably continue boarding around you, that’s fine–if they did not build enough time into the schedule to properly load the aircraft, that’s their fault, not yours.
It deeply angers me that you have to be so knowledgeable about every tiny damn policy just to do something as simple as board a fucking plane. The only other insight I can give is that after safety, the airlines’ next biggest concern is being on-time so if you’re not being heard or helped:
Agents deal with distressed people all day. Getting screamed at or cried on can happen dozens of times a day (and for most people, think 10-12 hour days). Some agents get hardened to passengers’ distress as a coping mechanism (or just because they suck, that’s true sometimes, too). But they all have a manager breathing down their neck to push planes on time. Very few non-safety problems will get addressed as quickly and concisely as one that is threatening to delay a departure.
