I'm sitting here in a BA Club Europe (don't get me started on what a disaster that is) seat going from Santorini to Heathrow and just needed to rant about something that has happened twice on this trip that I'd not recently encountered.
Being based in a AA hub, I fly them a lot. This trip, I'm waiting to board my flight to Athens. Now American has NINE (plus concierge key, disabled preboarding, and service members) boarding groups. I've gotten use to people in the later groups hovering around the boarding lanes. I can see this pair of women with group 4 (Gold / AA credit card holders). We're in group 1 so I motion to Margy that we should be prepared to dodge these people when they start the regular boarding groups. Of course, the porters are now trying to preboard the wheel chair passengers and nobody is getting out of the way, so I pipe up "WHEELCHAIRS COMMING THROUGH, EVERYBODY MOVE LEFT." That got people paying attention. Then they board group 1. I start to move forward (many people telling me to go ahead for fixing the preboard) but these two chicks are still attempting to board and the spineless gate agent lets them. It's completely pointless to. Group 1 is first/business class. 2 and 3 there's hardly anybody in (it's the higher levels of AA's frequent flyer status who aren't in first/business, I'm in 3 when on the rare time I'm travelling coach) so these chicks aren't gaming anything by jumping the line. There's still going to be plenty of bin space in coach.
Then leaving Santorini today, they call group 1 and EVERYBODY storms the gate. Not only that they stuff all their crap in the Business Class overheads. Barely could find room for my rolly. Again, I blame spineless gate agents.
Of course, 9 boarding groups is silly. United has only 5. First is 1, and other priority is 2. They have signs all over that tell everybody in 3+ to just remain comfortably seated until called.
Being based in a AA hub, I fly them a lot. This trip, I'm waiting to board my flight to Athens. Now American has NINE (plus concierge key, disabled preboarding, and service members) boarding groups. I've gotten use to people in the later groups hovering around the boarding lanes. I can see this pair of women with group 4 (Gold / AA credit card holders). We're in group 1 so I motion to Margy that we should be prepared to dodge these people when they start the regular boarding groups. Of course, the porters are now trying to preboard the wheel chair passengers and nobody is getting out of the way, so I pipe up "WHEELCHAIRS COMMING THROUGH, EVERYBODY MOVE LEFT." That got people paying attention. Then they board group 1. I start to move forward (many people telling me to go ahead for fixing the preboard) but these two chicks are still attempting to board and the spineless gate agent lets them. It's completely pointless to. Group 1 is first/business class. 2 and 3 there's hardly anybody in (it's the higher levels of AA's frequent flyer status who aren't in first/business, I'm in 3 when on the rare time I'm travelling coach) so these chicks aren't gaming anything by jumping the line. There's still going to be plenty of bin space in coach.
Then leaving Santorini today, they call group 1 and EVERYBODY storms the gate. Not only that they stuff all their crap in the Business Class overheads. Barely could find room for my rolly. Again, I blame spineless gate agents.
Of course, 9 boarding groups is silly. United has only 5. First is 1, and other priority is 2. They have signs all over that tell everybody in 3+ to just remain comfortably seated until called.