Boarding flights in the United States is a hot mess… it’s a little different than in Japan! Airlines have tried to commoditize the boarding process as much as possible (by giving people an incentive to earn status, pick up a credit card, or outright pay for priority boarding), while doing little to actually enforce the boarding order.
It seems that American Airlines has a plan that will see the airline enforcing its boarding priority, and I kind of love it. This first started being trialed several weeks ago, and is now being expanded on a widespread basis.
American’s genius plan to stop boarding “cheaters”
American has nine boarding groups (not including pre-boarding), and all too often you see people not following the correct boarding order, and boarding way ahead of when they’re supposed to. In some cases I suspect it’s because people truly don’t know better, though I would guess that in most cases people know exactly what they’re doing.
Part of the issue with enforcing boarding order is how we go about boarding planes. You generally go up to the gate scanner, and then scan your own boarding pass face down, whether it’s on your smartphone or a physical boarding pass. It’s very rare to see gate agents actually check boarding passes prior to them being scanned. Of course this creates a recurring problem. When people realize they can get away with it once, they do it again.
Several weeks ago, View from the Wing reported on how American started rolling out technology to simplify the boarding process, and it’s… remarkably easy?
Thanks to new technology from the Fort Worth-based airline, when passengers scan their boarding passes before their group number has been called, an audible tone and visual alert will go off at the scanner, so that the gate agent knows that they’re trying to board ahead of their group. The gate agent is then supposed to ask the passenger to step aside until their group is called.
American has been trialing this for the past several weeks at a limited number of airports. There’s now an exciting update. As reported by Sean Cudahy, American has now expanded this technology to over 100 airports in the United States. So you can now expect this to be used on a widespread basis.
Well done, American!
It’s not often I say this, but… well done, American, on introducing technology that should improve the passenger experience! It’s important for airlines to enforce boarding priority for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that they market priority or preferred boarding as a perk to so many different passengers.
This is such an obvious and simple solution, and it should make boarding with the first few groups a little bit less stressful. Of course it’s worth acknowledging a couple of points:
- It comes down to the gate agent to actually enforce the rules, based on the tone they hear
- This adds a small layer of complexity for those trying to board with a companion in a lower group, as that’s still generally allowed, but could lead to a tone
Bottom line
American is rolling out technology to enforce the intended boarding priority. With this new system, there’s a tone when someone tries to board before their group number is called, making it much harder to get away with cutting the line. This is a simple but smart development, and I’m happy to see it.
While this was initially trialed at a very limited number of airports, the technology has now been expanded to over 100 airports, so we should start to see the positive benefits of this.
What do you make of American’s new boarding technology?
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