Our Team
All Heathrow Travel-Care’s activities are overseen by the Service Manager, who is supported by a team of five full-time equivalent posts and a number of trained and experienced volunteers.
We aim to have a social worker available between 09.00 and 17.00 on working weekdays. Please note that on Thursdays, we open at 11.00 to allow for training and planning.
Outside of office hours, we operate an emergency on-call system via Heathrow’s Star Centre in order to provide Initial Humanitarian Assistance. With appropriate pre-planning, and where resources are available, we do attend specific arrivals outside of our office hours where there is an urgent need.
As a team, our collective experience includes Local Authority social work, world travel, foreign languages, airline and airport work. In addition we have access to various useful online resources, as well as our own professional networks that enable us to offer signposting to other service providers and support networks.
Our style of work is flexible, creative, and respectful. We always aim to work to statutory standards, particularly with regard to assessments, information sharing and confidentiality.
We keep records of all our assessments and adhere to General Social Care Council guidelines.
The team is supported by a number of office support volunteers who have many years’ relevant experience. We also have support from accountants, legal advisors and a reserve of trained emergency responders available to support our Initial Humanitarian Assistance on a call-out basis.
All core staff and office support volunteers at Heathrow Travel-Care are subject to enhanced Criminal Record Checks and hold airside ID passes, this enables us, where necessary to meet arrivals directly.
Our vision for the future, includes having the resources to offer extended opening hours.
We always appreciate feedback - please let us know what we did well, or what we can do to improve our services. Feedback forms and the Heathrow Travel-Care complaints procedure are available at the front of our office. These are also available on request by email from Heathrow_Travel_Care@baa.com, alternatively, you can complete our Online Feedback.