They Fly Through the Air with The Greatest of Ease… (After the Pandemic)
Senior travelers and their families are vaccinated!
This year’s holiday season won’t be the lonely affair of 2020. Seniors will be packing their bags and joining children and grandchildren for Thanksgiving and Christmas, or they will be shoving off for warmer climates following the hectic activities of family gatherings.
8 Travel Tips for Seniors
With this in mind, we’ve put together some practical hints and tips to erase any stress for our senior travelers and their families when they travel this holiday season.
1. Safety and Security.
Women should wear a money belt under their tops or a wallet on a cord hanging around their necks and hidden under a coat. Men should wear the same type of wallet on a cord secured to a belt and tucked into their pants. Keep carry-on luggage between your feet when standing or loop the shoulder strap around the leg of a chair when sitting.
2. Print your boarding pass.
The night before your flight, print out your boarding pass. Technically, if you have a smartphone, you don’t need to. But a printed boarding pass is a safety guarantee against any sort of technical problem like your device running out of power.
3. Reserve wheelchairs.
When you make your reservations, request free wheelchair service so that a wheelchair will be there at your airport origination, connection location, and arrival location. Remember, the airline has no obligation to honor your request when you check-in or when you are en route. If traveling alone, make sure that there is human assistance beginning at the counter and continuing through security, the gate, and boarding the aircraft.
4. Aisle seats.
Getting from place to place is hard enough without needing to climb over a seatmate every time you want to use the restroom or need to stretch. If two of you are traveling, get two aisle seats across the aisle from each other.
5. Stand and stretch.
When you are flying for many hours in a cramped airplane it is important that you stand and stretch as often as you can to prevent the possibility of getting DVT. DVT (deep vein thrombosis) is a serious condition that can cause death during or after a long flight.
6. Medicines.
Keep all your medications in your carry-on luggage. Don’t take the chance of meds being packed in a piece of luggage that ends up being lost.
7. Water.
High altitudes are dehydrating. Pass on the liquor, and drink plenty of water. Keep sipping throughout your flight. And, as an additional bonus, if it leads to your needing to go to the lavatory, you are getting in some of that necessary moving about.
8. Ask about the senior discounts.
Delta, Delta Shuttle, United, American, Continental, Southwest, US Airways, and Air France have some discounts for senior travelers, but not on all routes.
Check with your travel agent for discounted fares. A travel agent will most likely deal with Cheapflights.com and AARP, if you are a member, for help with discounts on hotels, car rentals, cruises, rail excursions, and tours.
A lot of seniors need to escape to someplace warm after celebrating the holidays with kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids. Travel agents recommend Accessible Journeys and Flying Wheels, specialists in tours for senior travelers and people with special needs and disabilities.
We, at Kabb Law, know the importance of getting away from it all. Do you have some additional travel tips you’d like to share and pass along?
We’d love for you to share your experiences and useful pieces of practical travel advice with us at 216-991-5222, so that we can pass them on to our other clients.
