Originally Posted by
jordyn
Actually, the one thing that I'm optimistic about with these fares is that boarding will hopefully be less of a mess since it finally does something about AA's fare/fee structure incentivizing bringing more bags into the cabin.
You and other people seem to be worried about how long it is going to take the GAs to announce a larger number of groups. As I pointed out earlier, this is silly. Getting through the gate is never the bottleneck in getting a flight away, and in general the announcement for the next boarding group is made while the previous group is still boarding meaning that it adds no time to the boarding process at all.
I agree that more boarding groups is irrelevant. But while they might save a few minutes dealing with gate checking bags, they might also spend the same time or more taking payments on basic economy passengers that didn't know the policy or are hoping to get away with it.
I'll be curious to see how willing they are to delay a flight to take the payments, as opposed to just gate checking the bags free for the sake of operations. Over time most passengers will learn and this will become more rare though. But I bet GAs will be suffering for a few months.
Depends how many BE fares they offer on a single flight I suppose. I've flown this fare only once, on Delta last Thanksgiving. Both directions we were assigned the last row of seats that didn't recline in front of the rear lav. It made me wonder how many of those types of fares were actually on the flight. Maybe not too many.