Tag Archives for boarding.
Since the 1930s, nearly every airplane has boarded passengers from the left side. The reason traces back to a small procedural habit that aviation inherited — and never escaped.
American’s new Chief Customer Officer Heather Garboden offhandedly mentions that “we’ve seen a 10% reduction in gate checked bags just within the first few weeks” of the carrier’s new boarding process.
If they’ve made changes to consciously drive down the number of bags they’re gate checking, that’s actually a huge win for customers and they should be shouting it from the rooftops! I just can’t figure out why they’re seeing this result.
Airlines offer priority boarding to first class passengers and to their elite frequent flyers. They also usually offer it to uniformed military personnel, and passengers with disabilities and to families with small children.
If you want to get on the plane early and don’t want to enlist in the military, I guess just keep having kids? Or pretending to?
More and smaller airports are needed. Streamlined security, that doesn’t wait for nationwide universal rollout, is needed. We need runways and taxiways and air traffic capacity to increase throughput without stacking delays. Most of all, we need to avoid complacency that accepts the status quo as given.
Airline passengers are pretending to be active duty members of the military, in order to board flights early.
American Airlines has been doing a lot of tinkering with its boarding process. They rolled out tech to enforce boarding groups, ‘declaring war on gate lice’ by having their systems audibly refuse boarding to passengers cutting the line and boarding before their group is called. And starting May 1, most domestic flights will begin boarding 5 minutes earlier.
Now they’re changing their boarding groups again.
When Southwest Airlines moves to assigned seating they will no longer line everyone up prior to boarding. Like the rest of the airline’s moves, Southwest’s boarding process will converge towards being much more like other airlines.
Gone will be the stanchions, and having passengers line up by group and number. In its place with be 9 boarding groups.
An important thing to know is that if you buzz because you’re boarding before your group is called, the gate agent can clear the flag on their screen and allow you to board. If you’re traveling with a family member or friend on a different reservation, for instance, it is actually policy according to the airline that you should still be allowed to board together in the earlier group.
Airlines could board faster, and that’s valuable. But the requirements they’d have to impose to do it would be too costly on families, and wouldn’t meet the needs and preferences of customers either. Once they begin shifting away from the ideal for speed, additional alterations make sense. Airlines have ultimately settled on what really does work best for their business – a tradeoff between speed and other priorities.
People queue up to board. They rush the gate. They try to board long before it’s their turn, even though they’ll be fine with overhead space usually unless they’re among the last on the plane.
Airlines made this game. They can’t do simple back-to-front boarding because they sell priority boarding, sell first class, and reward customers with status.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
