Originally Posted by
drvannostren
I must be crazy, cuz this new thing seems totally backwards to me.
As it stands the busiest flights at IAH end up with 5 lines (btw I just flew AA for the first time in a while, why is there 9 boarding groups? They just end up skipping half of them anyway) and at the very least it's fairly orderly in my experience. In the gates that have the proper space, people don't even really spill out into the walkway in the terminal either. If you're gonna cut the boarding groups, it just seems to me that the gate liceing will be out of control. You'll have a GIANT horde of people in the one "line" which will be 3 people wide and then a normal priority boarding type line. It just means more and more people will congregate near the desk which isn't good for anyone.
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AA's group numbers changed a little while back. Old Group 1 became Group 5. Groups like ExPlat, First Class, etc. that were boarded before Group 1 are now groups with numbers 1-4. More fine-grained, but doesn't allow queuing in chutes far ahead unless there were 9 chutes. Credit cards on AA used to be Group 1 but are now Group 5, still "Priority boarding" but explaining that Group 5 is priority is a little weird. Groups 1-4 do not necessarily have tons of people on each flight, but some do have tons. Equivalent on UA would be like moving Global Services to its own group number and shifting all the other numbers downward.