Gael Hannan, editor from The Better Hearing Consumer , wrote an excellent article about hearing loss travel tips. The article above has been adapted from her original at Hearing Health Matters.
Does your hearing loss prevent you from traveling, worrying about potential problems on the trip? Get over it – communication problems can happen anywhere – including at home.
Everywhere you go, you take your hearing loss with you. Probably it’s your most faithful, although not favorite, travel companion, with barriers popping up at every turn – when calling a taxi, checking in to a hotel, ordering food in noisy restaurants, or talking with people whose foreign-accented lips make speechreading just a tad challenging.
Here are a few basic travel communication strategies to kick down a lot of those barriers:
Self-identify! This is a no-brainer rule of the road that travelers ignore at their peril. If you don’t let people know you have hearing loss, you won’t get what you need, and therefore you have no right to get upset at poor or inaccessible service. Contrary to popular belief, most hearing people and tourism/hospitality people are not mind readers.
Clearly communicate your needs. (I know, I hear ya, ‘oh-duh-please-tell-me-something-I-don’t-already-know’ . But hey, this is worth repeating.) If you say, “I’m hard of hearing” and leave it at that, the hotel clerk might just think, “Well, that’s nice, thanks for sharing.” Be specific about what you need – amplification, captioning, etc. Providers sometimes call these ‘special needs’, which makes me crazy. Good communication skills, amplification and print interpretation are not ‘special’; they are fundamental needs of a huge chunk of today’s population.
Let Them Know You’re Coming! When making online bookings for hotel, air or rail, you should check off the Hard of Hearing (or Hearing Loss) box under ‘Special Needs’ (sigh). This may or may not result in better service. Sometimes “DEAF” or “HARD OF HEARING” is marked on the boarding pass, sometimes not. When it is marked, or if you verbally self-identify to the customer service person, he or she may look up you, all startled-like: “OMG, how am I supposed to talk to this deaf person?” Just smile and wait to see what they offer.
Sometimes it’s early boarding along with the babies and the infirm. I’ve heard of people receiving seat upgrades, although I’m not sure how this helps people with hearing loss, unless flight attendants speak more clearly in first class. Or they may tell you to have a seat in the lounge, and they will visually alert you when it’s your turn to board. In this case, if I have nothing else to do, or am feeling feisty, I sit close by and don’t take my eyes off them, unblinking, unrelenting, willing them to give me ‘the wave’. This might creep them out enough to get you an early boarding. Brilliant idea: airports could reduce traveler anxiety and employee stress by using signage to announce which rows are being boarded!
However you do it, your bottom line is that you have to be on that plane when it takes off. I almost missed a flight once because I’d lost track of time, wandering the airport, and didn’t hear the PA calling my name. Now I arrive at the gate well in advance.
The final word: Anticipating communication needs makes for a much smoother trip. I couldn’t prepare for being in the eye of a tropical cyclone, but emergency preparedness has come a long way since then – especially in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Minor glitches like these aside, traveling is one of life’s joys, so pack your bag amd kick down some barriers.
