BA Gold travelling on AS (impact of their seating policy)
 

I have just returned from a great trip to SFO and SEA with side trip to Yellowstone via Billings and Bozeman. It involved 4 sectors with AS (well 2 with AS and 2 with QX (Horizon, part of the AS Group)).

Has anybody had experience travelling on AS as a BA gold or silver?

AS have a strict boarding process that starts with their MVP elite members, first class etc and then the main cabin in two halves (rows 15-35 and 6-14).

It took me a while to work out, but when calling forward their elite members, the AS gate staff included a reference to elite members of partner airlines.

What was not clear was who were partner airlines (later reference to the inflight magazine listed BA as a partner) and how they told whether you were an elite member (since the bp only has 'Executive Club nnnnnnnn'. I'd be interested to know the naswer particularly to this latetr point as on all 4 sectors gate staff turned away people not called for boearding

You just need to have your Gold card out and show it as you show your boarding card.

I've not done this with a BA card, but as an AA Exp it seems to work just fine.

We got naff all with Alaska (Horizon) Airlines.

They even charged us excess baggage (Mrs Globaste was a Gold at the time and I was silver) because our single bag between 2 people weighed 1.2kg over the 23kg limit. This same bag weighed 23.4kg when we left heathrow and had the same items in it.

I took a picture of the scales readout and sent a rant when i got back.

On a separate note, Horizon have a great cabin crew. I think they are an all Q400 fleet so I wouldn't worry about getting priority boarding anyway. Just get a seat near the back and you get less vibration noise.

Thanks. It was the AS flights to/from SFO-SEA that I was more worried about. However even with a 737-700 up to SEA, I was surprised how much space there was in the overhead lockers. Seat pitch felt good too.

You're right about the Q400s. We ended up in row 9 and the vibration was pretty awful. I thought they were supposed to have noise/vibration suppression- it's either lousy or wasn't working.