I am a disabled individual that uses a motorized wheelchair who had a problem flying with Frontier Airlines out of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, GA.  My wife and I were flying to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida on May 17th, 2024, on flight F9 2174, scheduled to depart Atlanta at 3:04pm. The flight was booked on March 1st, 2024.  At the time of booking, I indicated that I had my own wheelchair and did not need further assistance.

Upon arrival at the airport, we were running late due to issues with finding an open parking lot.  After clearing security before 2pm, we checked and saw that our gate was E-2.  If you are not familiar with Hartsfield-Jackson, that is all the way at the end of the furthest domestic terminal.  When we arrived at the gate, a flight was boarding, but it wasn’t ours.  We were told that the gate had been changed to T-16, which was at the end of the terminal closest to security.  Before leaving terminal E, we stopped at the airport’s information desk and confirmed that our gate had been changed to T-16.  We make a mad dash across the airport to terminal T, only to get down to gate T-16 to find it empty and nothing about our flight.  We asked an airport employee and was told that the gate had been changed back to E-2!!  We received no notification from Frontier of the initial gate change to T-16, and I received an email at 3:58pm about the change back to E-2.  The email notifying me about the flight being delayed from 3:04pm until 3:51pm was not received until 5:07pm!

It was at this time, due to 2 mad rushes across the airport, that the battery in my wheelchair died.  My wife found an airport employee who called for wheelchair assistance.  A supervisor showed up and confirmed that our gate was indeed E-2 now.  However, he said he had no one available to push me back to E-2, and our choices were to either miss the flight or try and make it, with me stopping to charge up every gate or so as my battery ran out again.  My wife made another mad dash across the airport to gate E-2 to explain the situation to the gate agent and to try and get them to hold the door.  By the time I made it to terminal E, but not down to the gate, the flight had left, and the gate agent told my wife that it was our fault because we had not “checked in with wheelchair assistance” when we arrived at the airport.  When she flat out told the agent that he had made up that rule, his reply was “it’s on the ticket”.  Unfortunately, we did not get the name of the wheelchair supervisor or the gate agent.

We found an area to sit, and I got in a chat with a Frontier support agent. During this chat, I was told that we had been marked as a no-show, and even after telling the agent what happened, we were told that he could only make a one-time exception and rebook our flight with no change fee.  However, the earliest that they could get us to Ft. Lauderdale was the following morning, after spending the night in the Cleveland (?) airport.  Since we were traveling to celebrate my parent’s 65th wedding anniversary, that flight was not going to work.  The only choices we had at that time were to do nothing, which would also cancel the return flight, or cancel (at no charge) the flight to Ft. Lauderdale so that our return flight would still be useable. Having no real choice, we had Frontier cancel the flight, and found a flight on Delta that got us into Ft. Lauderdale that evening.

When returning to Atlanta on Sunday, May 19th, per the instructions of the Frontier gate agent in Atlanta, we checked in with wheelchair assistance, and when the person on duty looked at me strangely as I sat there in my personal motorized wheelchair, we told her the story of our flight from Atlanta. At this point in time, she started laughing.  After she stopped, she then took us over to the Frontier ticket counter, where we repeated our story for two Frontier ticket agents, who also laughed and then told us that there is no such rule.

I have sent a complaint to the USDOT, Frontier Airlines and Hartsfield-Jackson Airport