Originally Posted by YVR4Ever

The thing about Rapidair is that just about everyone seems to have status. I recall flights where they start the priority boarding call and half the people at the gate all stand up in unison. At least they are orderly and generally know what they are doing. On the sunshine flights (YVR-LAX is the one I frequent), there are far fewer status pax, so easier for Zone 2 me to get on board, but of course it is also a gong show in terms of people knowing what to do.

I hesitated to make any cultural comments for the reasons others have mentioned, but I will say that YYZ-TLV can be highly entertaining and I say that as someone with lots of experience with and appreciation for the culture of most of the people on that flight.

Originally Posted by yyckerr

This is a hugely important piece of the puzzle. What we are dealing with here in this thread are basic crowd management fundamentals. Managing groups of people at an airport is no different than groups at Disneyland, concerts, or election polling stations.

Regardless the location, the physical infrastructure will almost never be perfect to manage the intended crowd. Whether it is lack of physical square footage at the gate to accommodate all passengers comfortably, lack of stanchions (those velvet ropes or seatbelt things), lack of signage, or any other combination of variables - it can all (usually) be overcome by humans that have the training in, and basic understanding of crowd dynamics.

The risk analysis model that is widely used in crowd management design and planning is the work of Prof. Dr. G. Keith Still and follows the acronym DIM(E)-ICE:

Three primary influences on crowd behaviour:
Design - limitations, capacity, throughput
Information - signage, announcements, social media, news
Management (of the venue) - systems, processes, procedures
Expectations - what are the expectations of the crowd? (Expectations is not cited in Dr. Still’s work but is a widely agreed upon update to the original formula among crowd management practitioners)

Three primary phases of crowd behaviour
Ingress - getting in
Circulation - moving around
Egress - getting out

Finally (and not in the acronym), we look at how these interact during the two primary modes of crowd behaviour:

Normal circumstances and behaviour, or
Emergency circumstances and behaviour.

The information we get out of examining the DIME variables and their interaction with the ICE behaviours, in both normal and emergency scenarios allow us to create strategies to mitigate the identified risks.

What’s the point? We know that no airport is perfect, and the single most effective tool for overcoming design, signage, stanchion, and other related shortcomings is by actual physical human communication and being interactive with the crowd with customized direction. The simple act of replacing the canned zone boarding announcement with a live, relevant announcement from the GA is highly, highly effective as described above.

tl;dr: All gate agents should do a basic crowd management course, it would universally change the airport experience.

DIM-ICE risk analysis model