No they are still issued at the gate, but curiously I chuckled to myself on this subject last night as I walked down the jetway to board at LHR. I noticed that there were a significant number of them lying along the jetway so clearly they must keep falling off.

How upset the poor passenger must have been when they arrived at their seat without the yellow label?

I'll try to explain this from an outsourced gate agent perspective.

Every damn person flying with oversized baggage (and the flyertalk guys) will appear at the gate and give you a long speech about how their bag has always been accepted before, there is plenty of space in the airplane and that his/hers bag containts extreme valuables, preferably glass or diamonds. That is about 2 minutes already gone at the gate. Then you are supposed to handwrite the tag and fill a paper about the bag, that is another minute gone atleast. Considering that 99% of the time there are 2 people at the gate and about 30 bags you should check-in, that is a minimum of 30 minutes gone atleast that you unfortunately don't have considering the minimal turnaround times.

I have a hard time seeing this as a problem of the staff.
Although I must note that a lot of the blame should be put on the passengers, people flying FR and U2 seem to have a much better understanding of the concept of gate checking than the customers of BA.

I have a hard time believing this... maybe with pre-boarding into gallerys.

I doubt it... maybe with preboarding into a gallery.

Thanks very much for your insight on this issue, we don't often get to see this perspective, so I think it's great that you have illustrated some of the difficulties here.

I also agree with you that the passengers using Ryanair in particular are better self disciplined in this area, perhaps given FR's previous hardline stance in this area. These days the airline is more relaxed, thankfully, but the passengers tend to still be quite sensible. On easyJet, they are still on a "one bag only" rule for most tickets, so that helps. However both airlines tend to get people queued up and pre-processed well before boarding, or even before the inbound aircraft has landed in some cases, which some people on FT seem to prefer (I hate it!). Not sure that would work for BA's passengers.

Exactly. Try queueing and pre-processing BA passengers and see what hell goes loose on FT when they cant say in the lounge for the extra 5 minutes.

I spent some time at the gate for fun and experience of being on the front line of an airline. Definitely worth it.
Would love to have some data on how much of the delays are caused by hand luggage, but since they are mostly tagged as gate delays there probably isn't any.

I can't say I've seen any delays due to hand baggage. Even if everyone is onboard and the doors (practically) shut before the scheduled departure time, there's always:

"we're waiting for paperwork"
"we're waiting for the last of the hold luggage to be loaded"
"we'll be off in 15 mins as ATC want us to wait"
etc.

Are BA SH passengers different from U2 or FR?

Depends on the destination, from my experience yes.

I would think so, one factor modifying the behavior would be the carrier reputation with handling luggage. FR is tough and everyone knows it, so people comply and do not try their luck. BA less so thus it is human nature to see how far you can push.

Interesting. I've see faffing around with hand luggage on most flights, but I also cannot recall a time where it was "officially" given as a reason for a delay. with SH, if you're boarding on time, then even with a huge amount of faffing around, you should still be fine for an on time departure. I guess it becomes more critical when you are late with boarding- but in such a situation the natural inclination is to blame "late boarding" (presumably due to late in bound/or knock on effect etc).

I also imagine that if ever there was a situation where a flight boarding on time was delayed by hand luggage issues the Captain might be circumspect about admitting as such and feel it easier to refer to slot delays or such like.

I have no doubt that this is correct. Which is why I think the yellow label on a bag to go under the seat in front is a good idea. I don't have a wheelie, but a back pack type thing that fits into the size gauge and fits under the seat in front. I would be very much against checking it into the hold (for all the reasons mentioned above) but I would be prepared to have a sticker put on it indicating that it needs to go under the seat in front.

Fair enough, I just made it up for a laugh :(

easyJet are now introducing a new cabin baggage policy similar to Wizz Air and Ryanair - https://www.easyjet.com/en/help/bagg...d-hold-luggage

Will leave BA as one of the only comparable carriers exLON to allow you to bring a case onboard free of charge.

Vueling has a strange twist to this. They have recently changed their equivalent of Basic fares so that you can only take the smaller personal item onboard - however an item that previously could have gone in the overheads, typically a smaller rollaboard bag, can be checked into the hold gratis.