Each of these occurred when I was on a late inbound, but still able to make the next flight by T-10. 3 times in the last 6-8 months, It's becoming tiresome.

1. Late inbound, inbound parks at A, outbound is C. I’m at the gate in C at T-15. The jetway door is open, gate agent present, she looks at me and says: “Flight is closed.” I point out it’s 15 minutes to flight time and the door is open. Snarky: “THE FLIGHT IS CLOSED SIR, YOU’LL HAVE TO GO TO CUSTOMER SERVICE.” In other words, “I’ve given all the seats away to others and I’m not going to deal with you now.”

2. Late inbound, a B center to A center connection (doesn’t get much better than that, unless it’s adjacent). Arrive at the A gate at T-13. Jetway door is closed: “I’m sorry sir, the flight is closed.” At least delivered with less snark.

3. Friday. Late inbound from RDU (ATC). Ms. Carolinaflyr calls Delta while taxing to the gate. Assures them we can move quickly. It’s a B4 to A9 sprint with about 20 minutes. Delta assures us that our res on 1446 to SFO is not cancelled. We arrive at A9 at t-11 (took a photo to document it). Jetway door closed, no gate agent. She reappears at T-2 from the Jetway and tells us “The flight closes 10 minutes before departure and you were not here.” We show her the photo that says otherwise and all eye contact ceases. “You’ll have to go to customer service.” She finally offers to call a redcoat, who repeats that we no-showed at T-10 (we show him the photo, as well, and, of course, all that can be done at that point is to get seats on a later flight).

While I applaud the desire to get flights out on time, it seems that there are no corresponding incentives not to close flights early with passengers in transit, which is a problem (and results in more disrupted passengers to accommodate downstream). There’s also the usual “blame the customer even if it takes alternative facts to do so,” but that’s another issue. More to the point, what seems to be fair compensation? These are not stuff happens misconnects, these are employee-caused misconnect. It also smells that there may be some flag in the system that presumes any customer whose inbound is closer to X than some time interval is presumed no-show, but I can’t prove that that is the case.

I’m thinking a bit more than the standard 5-10K skypesos on this one. There needs to be some policy update and some “retraining” on this issue. FWIW, I’ve had the exact opposite experience in SLC where agents keep a flight open past t-10 when they know that the inbounds are sprinting through the terminal