What could have been an affordable trip that allowed me to meet a dying friend has ballooned in expenses.

When the meetup in London was announced for a Discord community I belong to, I was thrilled. I have a longtime friend of 25 years who lives in England but whom I've never met in person. And the company organizing the meetup offered to reimburse up to $800 in travel expenses. At the time, I found loads of flight + hotel packages that were just a little higher than this, making it very affordable! However, there was the possibility of the company getting a block of rooms people could stay in, so I waited.

The block of rooms never happened, so I finally went to look at my travel options last week and found that everything had gotten much more expensive. The airfare alone cost more than $800, and then I still needed a hotel for three nights.

I can't just stay at any hotel. I am a power wheelchair user, and I need to stay somewhere that my 400-lb wheelchair does not encounter any stairs. England does not have any accessibility requirements for businesses like we do in the US, thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act, and my options were frustratingly limited.

Last week, on Wednesday, July 29, I booked a trip on Booking.com, not knowing how difficult it would be to contact customer service if I had a problem. I'd had a medical procedure that day, and I didn't even think about the fact that sedatives + steroid injections made me not mentally competent to sign a legal contract, which is what travel reservations are. It was more expensive than I can probably afford, but there were now extenuating circumstances that made getting to England to finally meet my friend more pressing.

My friend in England has been diagnosed with a terminal illness since the London meetup was announced, and he was immediately unhappy with my choice of hotel, saying the area was not safe for a solo female traveler in a power wheelchair and that it wasn't as accessible (the area, not the hotel) as my scant research had suggested, so I was going to have a terrible time getting to where the actual meetup events were happening several miles away. He spent several days asking me if I'd changed my hotel yet, begging me to get it done.

To complicate things further, I never got my confirmation email for my trip, but my debit card was charged. Not getting the confirmation email meant that, days later when I finally got a phone number to call, I didn't have the PIN the AI-powered phone line required in order to speak to an actual human.

I asked my husband to call the phone number that appeared next to the charge on our bank account, and it was for Priceline. This was Monday, August 3. While in the same family of companies as Booking.com, Priceline had a different reservation system and different customer service team. He finally got a human on the line, and they actually seemed willing to help, but they had to get permission from the hotel property to cancel my reservation, and they weren't able to get anyone on the line. This was a time zone issue, but I still haven't heard from them today (Tuesday, August 4), and I worry that the hotel isn't going to allow me to cancel my non-refundable reservation despite the extenuating circumstances.

Under the assumption that I will get my money back for the original hotel, I booked a new room (Tuesday, August 4) that is within the area I need to be in, so accessible transit is no longer an issue for me. However, the price of the room went up even since yesterday, so now the cost of my travel is over $1,500...and that's assuming I get the other hotel room refunded.

After accounting for the $800 in travel I will be reimbursed for, this is still about $600 more than I expected to pay before leaving the US, and I'll need money to get around when I get there. But I may never get a chance to meet my friend again, if he even makes it until October...which is not a certainty.

I'm asking for donations to help offset the cost of this trip that ended up being so much more expensive than I originally anticipated.

As a power wheelchair user on SSDI who desperately wants to meet her dying friend in London, can you help me out? Any amount helps.