Originally Posted by
zarp
I always sort of assume they're not willing to budge on conformance sometimes because they've given the seat to someone else - especially on days with lots of delays. Whether it's true or not I'm not sure.
That may well be in there, indirectly. The point of conformance is to make sure passengers can get to their gate - and their bags - without delaying the flight, the OP here will feel this would have been possible. But what happens is that the flight closes at about 45 minutes to departure and standby passengers (crew and some passengers) get slotted into empty seats from that point until boarding closes - this theoretically is 20 minutes to departure, and actually so for bus gates. So that's a fairly narrow 25 minute window, and then conformance is at 35 minutes (it can be less) so you are now down to just 15 minutes. Robotics sometimes off load people an hour before arrival because the robots have a view about delays - sometimes they get their calculations wrong. In this case if the OP was offloaded at 35 minutes then had the flight been on time then boarding may have already started. If someone is HBO and near the gate and has no mobility issues, then BA can and does let people through, but add add in complexity such as bags and children the request is likely to be denied.
Clearly there is scope to compromise here. So for example if the next flight is delayed by 30 minutes it is highly unlikely that all of this can be recovered by a quick boarding, so putting a dynamic and automatic 10 minutes extra margin for HBO passengers would seem to me sensible on first glance. But then you would have some passengers being blocked due to baggage, and while arguing with the ground agent, someone else, HBO, sails through.