Nothing like a real world experience to help me understand why consolidating operations into the B Concourse is a good thing.

The other day, my mailine LAX-DEN flight was delayed, first waiting for a group of flight attendents who were late from their inbound flight and then sitting at the end of the taxiway waiting for our numbers (I think the pax. manifest count didn't match the manual count, among other things). We even took a 'victory lap' onto 25R to reposition us at the end of the queue. Anyhow, we got into DEN about 20 min late, which ate up most of my connection time for my TED flight to MDW. As we were on out taxi into the gate, the purser announced that they had called ahead and let operations know many of us had ultra-tight connections. The crew was even nice enough to hold the cabin up to let us (about six of us) dash of the plane first.

So, I race over to the train to Concourse A and hoof it to the gate (about 7 min) only to find that they have just closed the flight and are pulling the jetbridge. For some reason, not only did they not hold the flight, but Ted decided to leave a few minutes early (Rar!). Since it was the last flight out of the day, I ended up with an involuntary reroute onto Frontier.