NEED TO KNOW
- Wicked actress Marissa Bode shared her emotional reaction when a flight attendant encouraged an airport worker to ask her directly how to assist her with her wheelchair
- Bode said people who are there to assist often ignore her or speak over her, leaving her feeling “invisible” while traveling
- Her post spotlights ongoing issues with disability access in airports
Marissa Bode is highlighting a simple act of kindness she recently experienced while traveling through an airport.
The Wicked star, 24, took to her TikTok on Monday, June 16, to detail the rare moment, while also getting candid about the ongoing issues that wheelchair users often experience when traveling by plane.
“You know the bar is in h— when I got lowkey emotional when an airport worker, for once, for once, recognized my autonomy,” she begins the video. She then recalled her previous experiences with airport wheelchair-assist workers and TSA agents being “horrendous” when it came to listening and speaking to her directly.
“Here I am, once again, about to get off the flight. They bring the aisle chair over. The two wheelchair-assist people are about to help me,” Bode recounts. “And this person goes to the flight attendant, ‘How should we help her? What should we do?’ And the flight attendant was like, ‘Ask her. She knows what’s best and what’s most comfortable for her. Ask her.”
Though Bode notes that “logically,” this should be the expected course of action, she says that it’s rarely the case.
“It’s so exhausting, every single time. Every single time I’m at the airport, they always ask one another, they never ask me until they absolutely have to, because again, no one bothered to ask me in the first place, so they don’t know what to do,” she continues in frustration.
She goes on to say that workers talking to each other as if she’s not there makes her feel “completely invisible.”
Bode wanted to acknowledge the considerate airport worker.
“Shoutout to old boy,” she adds in the clip. “It shouldn’t be something that I’m taken aback by or something I’m praising in the first place, because it should just be standard, but it absolutely is not, unfortunately. All love to flight attendant man for being the one rarity of actually seeing me as a person.”
Many wheelchair users have raised grievances over the years about the third-party wheelchair assist workers in airports and what they claim is disrespectful behavior toward those who use the service.
While airlines typically contract out this work, in October 2024, the U.S. Department of Transportation hit American Airlines with a $50 million penalty for its “numerous serious violations” against passengers with disabilities who traveled with them between 2019 and 2023.
“The era of tolerating poor treatment of airline passengers with disabilities is over,” said former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in a statement shared in a release at the time.
“With this penalty, we are setting a new standard of accountability for airlines that violate the civil rights of passengers with disabilities,” Buttigieg continued. “By setting penalties at levels beyond a mere cost of doing business for airlines, we’re aiming to change how the industry behaves and prevent these kinds of abuses from happening in the first place.”
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