ALTHOUGH wheelchair-bound, national para chess player Jasper Rom, one of the players who delivered for the country in the last 4th Hangzhou Asian Para Games, is used to traveling often by plane alone and has faced no hassles so far — until last week.
Rom was by his lonesome when he flew via Singapore-based budget carrier Scoot to Hangzhou, China to compete in the Hangzhou Asian Para Games, winning a gold and silver medal while grieving over the loss of his parents, who passed away during the meet.
After paying his last respects to his parents last week in Cebu, he booked a flight on Scoot last Nov. 2 for Jakarta, Indonesia, where he works as a key staff of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the regional umbrella organization.
He never expected that he would be a victim of discrimination.
“I was looking forward to traveling back home to Jakarta to be with my family. I have booked my flight from Cebu to Jakarta through FlyScoot TR385/TR278 via Singapore and was expecting to arrive in Jakarta early evening of 3 November 2023,” he told Malaya-Business Insight.
“When I tried to check in at the Scoot counter at the Mactan Cebu International Airport on the early morning of 3 November, the staff of Scoot” refused to check him in. “The reason was that I am a person with disability, traveling alone and that they do not have a wheelchair service available,” Rom recalled.
“I tried to reason that I have always been used to traveling alone and have not had any problems with any airlines, including Scoot, which I boarded during my flight from Singapore to Hangzhou on 16 October 2023,” he added.
Instead of being accommodated, “the Scoot staff asked me to wait while they had a long discussion with their manager, only to come back and inform (me) that they cannot let me check in into the scheduled Scoot flight for the reasons they mentioned earlier,” he said.
