sorry, struggling with this whole thread ! The likes etc.... it’s a plane
BA team members do their best to enforce / acknowledge seat/ baggage - especially their ‘ frequent flier customers. HBO is abused . People behave the way they do , sadly ( some will no doubt disagree) they get away with it .
If on board and you see such mis use - why not speak to CC?
BTW to the OP - if I was following that individual on board I would have (100%) said something to the crew.

Yes it is ridiculous and it delays flights. I am tired of waiting in the aisle while others try to force enormous bags into the lockers. I just don’t understand why BA are not more proactive about this.

I don’t normally fly BA and am an American. If this was the US I may have been more comfortable saying something to the cabin crew or even directly to the passenger(s). Being overseas and a guest in a different country I tend not to be as confrontional as I am back home.

I was also not annoyed at the time but very amused that so many carry-ons would be tolerated. At this point too I assumed agents at check-in and at the gate had been okay with this so not sure my input would have been helpful.

Natural by-product of offering cheap people the chance to save a few quid by packing an entire checked back into their carry ons and cheap airline management the chance to squeeze an extra row or two of passengers and their carry ons in by slimming the seats, removing the bulkheads and closet. If we wanted Ryanair, we’d all fly it. Right?

I hope they don’t adopt American policies... fell foul of their stupid policies trying to bring a rolled art tube along side my bag into their 777 First class last month.

In my experience BA do checks at the gate and take bags off people in line with the expected loads. It may not be quite as sophisticated as the modelling on AA (where gate agents seem to know the number of bags they need to take off people in the higher boarding numbers), but generally it works quite reasonable.

If the gate agents in this case let the pax through, maybe they didn't do their job properly, but also the flight may have not been full and they knew there would be space.

I find it quite extraordinary that some people on this thread feel the need to police other passengers or make sure that parts of the overhead storage stays free. This is for the airline to sort. And if FR & U2 are so much better at managing cabin bags - maybe people should fly them more.

IMHO, the fairest way is to have a set of rules are abide by them. There may have been space for all the bags on this flight, but another it would have caused a delay and that is disrespectful of other passengers. If you stick by the rules all of the time, people learn to stick by them, if you allow a little beyond the rules each time, pax will see how much they can get away with. I feel for the CC who have to play a game of Tetris on every flight, particularly given the generous baggage allowance for most tickets and the little difference between HBO and Baggage Included fares (compared to extortionate amounts seen with LCC in order to be able to advertise a falsely low fare.

Sounds like it could have been someone from Flyertalk. The "I shouldn't have to put my small bag under the seat if I didn't bring a big bag" seems a pretty common attitude around here.