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The head of London’s Heathrow Airport is blaming TikTok videos promoting a so-called “travel hack” for passengers who need wheelchairs experiencing long waits for assistance.

In an interview with LBC radio, Heathrow CEO John Holland-Kaye said the airport is seeing a higher demand for wheelchair assistance now than before the COVID-19 pandemic. He said able-bodied travelers have been abusing the service, creating a regular backlog of passengers who truly need help moving through the airport and boarding or deboarding planes. 

“Now why is that happening?” Holland-Kaye said. “Some of this is because people are using the wheelchair support to try to get fast-tracked through the airport. That is absolutely the wrong thing to be doing.

“If you go on TikTok, you’ll see that that is one of the travel hacks that people are recommending. Please don’t do that. We need to protect the service for the people who need it most.”

In June, a TikTok user posted a video showing him faking a leg injury “to get through security faster,” he said, on a flight from Ibiza, Turkey, to Bristol, England. At the end of the video, the man stands up from the wheelchair and walks away from it.

The video, which has been viewed 2.5 million times, drew condemnation from disability rights advocates.

A review of TikTok found other videos recommending that passengers pretend they need wheelchair assistance.

“We put my sister in a wheelchair to skip lines at the airport,” one user brags in a video.

Others show people assisting passengers who seemingly needed wheelchairs but still boasted about cutting security lines.

In response to another video, a disabled TikTok user described an arduous experience she recently had flying from Philadelphia to London, when she encountered problems with wheelchair service on both ends. 

“Don’t frickin’ do this because I cannot tell you how awful it is right now and how understaffed it is,” she said. “Please don’t make disabled people’s lives more painful and stressful than they already are.”