“Let me know when you are able to get a flight in, honey.” It’s been a year since I got that text, a year since my sister walked into an urgent care in my hometown of South Bend, Indiana, when she called my mom as her partner drove her to the emergency room. A year since she was intubated, my mom caressing her hand, before she closed her eyes for the last time. Her life was then on support, but in reality, her life was gone.
Sitting up in bed, I had to find a flight from Los Angeles to South Bend. “There’s only one flight that gets there earlier,” I texted, knowing another message was soon to come. I updated my mom with every search. My dad, her husband of nearly 40 years, had passed just nine months before. When that happened, I was on a work trip to Bermuda that had literally just landed hours before I needed to leave again. And somehow that felt easier to finagle than this.
Getting to where you need to be in moments of grief and duress and emergency can feel like solving string theory when you’re inundated with emotions and other logistics that don’t involve planes. Thankfully, I had points and miles. Thankfully, I had a credit card and savings. Thankfully, thankfully, thankfully, I could get home.
But the one thing I wish I had known at this moment was the existence of bereavement fares. Sometimes called “compassionate fares,” these rates are special, flexible airline tickets offered in circumstances of imminent death or the loss of an immediate family member—often with reduced prices, looser change rules, and the ability to book very last-minute without the usual penalties.
The ins and outs of bereavement fares
The big thing to know is that bereavement fares not offered by every airline. These are the ones who do: Delta Air Lines, Alaska Airlines, Air Canada, and WestJet are four airlines that have specific bereavement fares outlined on their websites. (Hawaiian Airlines has a bereavement page, as well, but it’s only for those traveling between the Hawaiian islands—though they do have stipulations for changing or canceling an existing booking due to bereavement as well, no matter where you’re flying.) Most of these airlines require you to call a person on their end. Many will require you to indicate the identity of the person who has died, how they were related to you, and other such information, which may or may not be triggering for some.
“Bereavement fares can be confusing, and frankly, the process isn’t always compassionate,” says Tovah Means, MS, LMFT, co-owner of Watch Hill Therapy. “Some airlines still offer them, but the requirements can feel bureaucratic at a moment when paperwork is the last thing you can emotionally manage. If you have the capacity, calling the airline directly can help—a real human voice sometimes makes room for nuance. But if you can’t deal with that, that’s completely legitimate. Grief shrinks your bandwidth. Choose whatever route feels least draining.”
Delta and Alaska—the airlines I reached out to that came back with a response at the time of publication of this article—couldn’t give much more info on their bereavement fares beyond what was outlined on their page. These public breakdowns, while thoughtful and rooted in genuine attempts to support travelers, also speak to a broader truth: As a culture, we’re still profoundly uneasy with death, grief, and the logistical chaos that comes with them.
Airlines aren’t trying to be cold—they’re operating within systems built for efficiency, not emotional emergencies—but the limits of those systems can make you feel even more alone at a moment when everything already feels isolating. Policies, procedures, and carefully worded statements can only go so far when you’re navigating one of the most disorienting experiences of your life; the gap between what’s offered and what’s needed becomes another reminder of how much we shoulder on our own in grief.
At the airport: Do let employees know what’s going on
That being said, talking to people on the ground when actually traveling can help even more. Countless stories (a lot of them Delta-crew based, from what I’ve found) talk about pilots, flight attendants, and passengers going out of their way to accommodate the grieving. Holding planes to make tight connections, heartfelt notes from the crew, and neighboring passengers helping grievers navigate the airport before landing have all made the internet rounds.
