Mother Flying Solo to Fiji Told to Choose Between Child or Wheelchair Assistance

A mother flying solo from Auckland to Fiji was told for safety reasons she could travel with either a wheelchair or her eight-month-old daughter, but not both.

Adilah Ahd was travelling to Nadi with Fiji Airways on February 25, to spend a fortnight of her maternity leave visiting family in the islands with her new child. Four days before flying, Adilah injured her ankle on a staircase at home.

While an X-ray revealed her foot was sprained, not broken, she was in two minds about the trip.

“My feet were so swollen I could barely walk,” she said, but her family said they would be able to look after her and her daughter, in Nadi.

Contacting the airline Fiji Airways told her not to postpone her trip. Ahd was told they would book her wheelchair assistance for her trip, via their airport and check-in service contractor Oacis.

However, it was only after check- in on the day of travel that everything was “turned upside down”. Having handed over her and her daughter’s luggage and stroller she was provided with a wheelchair, which she sat in with her baby on her lap.

Her husband, Shay, was unable to travel with her due to work commitments but had taken them to the airport that Sunday.

They were making their way to departures with a member of the check-in team, when another Oasis staff member shouted at them from behind the counter.

Surprising the young family, the check-in worker told them the baby could not travel on her mother’s lap-ostensibly for safety reasons.

“My husband was, like, ‘Sorry, what do you mean?’”

And she says ‘(The) baby can’t go on the wheelchair’”

Her husband asked for a solution, explaining his wife was travelling solo with their daughter and needed wheelchair assistance.

Passenger Adilah Adh says she was forced to carry her 8-month daughter on an injured ankle after wheelchair assistance was deemed ‘unsafe’.

The woman’s advice was to “go home and get better” but Adilah said at this point this seemed like her best option even though she couldn’t cancel her flight and faced losing her fare.

“I couldn’t handle it and I just started crying, all my excitement for the trip just went down the drain,” she said.

However, when the manager eventually did turn up and they asked to have the baby’s stroller back,

Shay and Adilah were told it was already loaded on the plane.

At this point, Ahd made up her mind to take her boarding pass and her daughter to try to catch the flight, anyway.

Walking on her injured ankle, she barely had time to say goodbye to her husband.

Clearly in pain, as she passed through customs Ahd said she had more sympathy and offers of help from other travellers than she did from the check-in agents.

Source: NZ Herald

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