Originally Posted by
VG31
I find this practice unnecesary and quite annoying. I don't know of any other European airline that does it - certainly not FR, BA, LX, LH, SK and KL. Even Emerald don't do it. If most airlines did boarding pass checks I wouldn't really care, but EI being the exception rather than the rule just delays boarding. I sometimes forget myself.
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Historically this
was indeed a thing, at least in Europe, and the 'door greeters' were frequently quite insistent on checking your BP before you could proceed down the aisle.
BP checks at the door were common back in the 80's/90's/00's when everyone had a standard format boarding card issued at the check-in desk and electronic BPs (or indeed smartphones) hadn't been invented - the multiplicity of airline apps and people having to unlock their phone screen again because it 'went to sleep' on the jet-bridge probably adds incremental seconds of delay to the door-check to the extent that it is now more of a hindrance than a benefit during the boarding process and has largely been dropped.
Also, back in the day the gate check was entirely a manual process with no beeping scanners and reliant on the sharp eyes of the gate agent to spot any anomalies so a secondary check at the door would have made much more sense.