Originally Posted by
HIDDY
I wonder if that has more to do with the number of status travellers flying at that time of the day? There were no problems on my last GLA-LHR flight. Although busy it departed during a time of the day when more leisure orientated passengers were travelling. It was all very civilised with no signs of people being desperate to board first.
I seem to recall it was done by aft row numbers first but I may be wrong.
As c-w-s astutely mentioned, GLA has its own unique problems which manifest themselves in chaotic passenger flows at and around the gate areas.
Here's a typical picture of what the gate area looks like at 06:15am on Monday mornings...
Queues form at the entrance to the fast track lanes as early as 06:00 - that's a good hour before departure and 30 to 40 minutes before boarding begins. Once the queue starts it grows very quickly and soon stretches all the way out of the gate cluster. This is typical for the BA1475 Heathrow shuttle, which leaves with a full load daily. The situation is exacerbated on Mondays because the BA1475 is timed slightly earlier, departing at 07:00 which more or less coincides with the 07:05 departure of the BA2966 to Gatwick. It has its own fast track queue stretching past the old BA lounge and into the pier.
These queues are building up while the bulk of the Emerald and Sapphire members are squeezed tight in the lounge. However, once boarding is announced in the lounge all hell breaks loose - the queue system invariably breaks down as impatient arrivees cut in or join the general boarding lines which happen to cross the fast track lines. You couldn't possibly engineer a more dysfunctional system.
As a general observation, the pattern of early queue forming coincides with the date oneworld Ruby's were given priority boarding privileges. I mean no disrespect to Bronze members as they are quite rightly availing themselves of a published tier benefit. My annoyance is directed squarely at BA for failing to respond to the new boarding dynamic - a more responsive boarding strategy should have been implemented that takes account of the increasing number of passengers using the fast track channels.