Another rant about "changes you will like"

Flying SFO-BRU-IAD-SFO, it struck me that both SFO and BRU have terribly designed lines for elite checkin and baggage drop. EDIT: to clarify, it was actually SFO-FRA-BRU-IAD-SFO. My bad.

In SFO's international terminal, there were four signs at the entry point for the first/business/GS/1K/etc elite lines, and several passengers were clearly confused about which one to take. These weren't rookie travelers either. Fortunately it was a slow time of day and nobody was at risk of missing a flight

At BRU (which I remember better because it was this morning) things were even worse. There were two elite lines, leading up to three monitors above agents.

Monitors 1 & 2 listed the following categories: "Global Services, Premier Access (TM), International First, International Business, 1K, Premier Platinum".

Monitor 3 listed "Premier Access, Premier Gold, Premier Silver, *G, *S".

The agents were screwed up, with the agent under Monitor 2 pulling from the lower-tier line. I assume that's an idiosyncratic glitch.

What gets me though is the systematic confusion created by having the word "Premier Access" appear in every single elite line, including ones for, e.g., GS/1K/First/Business. It's pretty easy for a well-intentioned pax to get confused and wind up in that line once they see the word Premier.

As a result of this snarl, it took me over 30 minutes of waiting in line to get my boarding pass. Not a huge deal, because I was early. And I was flying on a W fare upgraded, so even though I was in business I didn't feel like I'd paid for anything special. On the other hand, if I were GS or someone flying in paid international first or business I would have been pretty pissed by the badly designed customer service.

Ok, long rant over.

I'm sure there's FT a thread somewhere about this topic, but I couldn't find one by using the search function.