Travel Support for People Living With Dementia or Cognitive Challenges
A Travel Companion for people living with dementia, including early-onset dementia, and for travellers whose brain injury, sensory challenges, or anxiety about flying make a journey hard to manage.
Last updated: October 10, 2026
We travel with people living with dementia, often moving a parent to the city where their adult children live, and travellers whose brain injury, sensory challenges, or anxiety about flying make travel hard. Your Case Coordinator gets to know the traveller, plans the day around their routines, and recommends a Travel Companion or, when clinical care is needed, a Medical Escort.
What makes travel harder for someone living with dementia?
An airport asks a traveller to follow instructions, keep track of belongings, and cope with noise, crowds, and changes of plan, all at once.
Unfamiliar surroundings. Security screening, gate changes, and a connection through a large airport are disorienting for someone who relies on routine and familiar places.
A move, not just a trip. Relocating closer to family means leaving a familiar home for a new one, and no one in the family can be at both ends of the journey.
Delays and surprises. A late flight or a missed connection means new instructions and a longer day, which is hardest for someone who finds change difficult.
How Portage helps
Your Case Coordinator starts with the reason the traveller needs support, whether memory, orientation, sensory load, or anxiety about flying, learns their routines, communication style, and what reassures or unsettles them, and builds the day around that: time to spare at every step and airline accessibility assistance requested in advance.
Travel Companion
An experienced caregiver is with the traveller from door to door, keeps the day predictable, handles documents, bags, and connections, provides hands-on personal care, reminds them about medications, and updates the family at agreed points.
Medical Escort
When the journey also needs clinical care, such as medications administered on a schedule or monitoring after a brain injury or stroke, a regulated healthcare professional travels with the traveller instead.
We confirm the right level at intake. Compare the two services.
A recent journey
A client living in Toronto developed early-onset dementia and, after a stay in hospital, had no one nearby to support him; his adult children had a business and families of their own in Halifax. The family chose a long-term care home near them. Because he needed help with his medications on the way, a Portage Medical Escort travelled with him, and his daughter flew with them. We coordinated the flights for both, and stayed with him from the hospital in Toronto to the door of his new home in Halifax, where the staff were expecting him.
What should we prepare?
Your Case Coordinator will ask for the traveller's daily routine and how they communicate, a list of medications and when they are taken, what helps when they are unsettled, their ID or passport, and a contact at each end of the journey. For a move, we also ask who will meet the traveller and where the day ends, a family home or a care residence. Where someone else holds decision-making authority, such as a power of attorney, we make sure proper consent is in place and that everyone involved is comfortable with the plan.
Guides for families of someone living with dementia
Two guides that answer the questions families ask us first.
Planning Air Travel for an Older Adult: Helping Them Travel Safely and Confidently
What do airline accessibility services cover, and what don't they?
Questions from families of someone living with dementia
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Often, yes. Many people living with dementia travel well when the day is structured, an experienced caregiver is beside them, and nothing has to be worked out on the spot. Your Case Coordinator talks with the traveller and the family about their day-to-day abilities, and we confirm at intake whether a Travel Companion or a Medical Escort is the right level of support.
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Yes. Decision-making and consent are part of our intake, so we confirm early who has the authority to make this decision, your parent or someone acting for them. You choose the home or care residence; your Case Coordinator plans the day from your parent's door to the new one, and a Travel Companion or Medical Escort travels with them.
Let’s plan the journey
Tell us about the traveller and the trip. We'll recommend the level of support, plan the journey, and have a Travel Companion ready to go.