Rifter

I am boarding on Finnair flight from HEL to MAD from gate 31B. There is no priority boarding here and gate personnel commented it is not possible to organize priority boarding at bus gates. I think that is a lame excuse.

Is this always the case at bus gate or was this just an adhoc story made up?

Trav1970

It's quite easy to arrange, if the airline really would want to. All it takes is more than 1 bus.

Some airlines seem to be taking this a bit more seriously. See link https://www.ausbt.com.au/emirates-ne...-shuttle-buses

Purjelentaja

At bus gates 50A-M they use separate busses for priority boarding, at least on long haul flights. The bus gates 31A-D have more limited space, probably not allowing using two busses.

FFlash

I just love how TK does it. Normally a first bus for boarding elites+J, for disembarking at apron they bring a separate J class bus for those in front. Easily doable if airline so wishes

remymartin

BA do priority bus for incoming aircraft, whereas all Asian airlines I’ve tried do priority buses both ways - yes, even VietJet for elite ticket holders even though the plane is one class!

mpkz

What's the point of a separate bus for priority pax on a 150 person flight? It's not like the US anyway where overhead bins are always full... And if the plane is full, they'll have multiple (non priority) busses anyway

aama

Exactly, priority boarding is only handy in the US where people carry ridiculous amounts of hand baggage and the airlines don't enforce the rules.

Anywhere else prio boarding is just... well a way to make others see who the elites/biz are 😅

remymartin

Yes, right. No one started selling “Light” tickets in Europe

intuition

The luggage problem exists on Finnair and is on the rise.

But priority boarding is also about getting to your seat and escapning the boarding chaos. I prefer to wait for take-off sitting in my seat rather than standing in the gate area. This can easily be arranged even with bus boarding and many airlines do.

What can't be accommodated at a busgate is the "board at your own convinience", ie a priority lane that allows you to skip a line if arriving late to the gate.
I think QR does drive one early and one late J-bus to the plane, but unless you are the last J pax to arrive, you still will be waiting on the bus before boarding.

Jainzar

The way you wrote that I don't see much issue to allow to skip the line. Just leave the priority line open and you will end up in the same bus as non-priority customers, but you might be in an earlier bus.
That is a different story and you pointed out the downside.

intuition

True, but the way HEL operates shorthaul busgates IME, the priority lane is used for all customers as soon as the initial few priority customers have gone thorugh. This is done as there are only 2 scanners and they would make the boarding overall slower if they didn't use both. This means that a few minutes after boarding started, there is no way of jumping the line.
Other airports have a slightly different approach. They offer physical infrastructure to make sure there is a priority path that bypasses the crowd and leads to one of the scanners. Then that scanner can serve both priority and non-priority simultaneously. IIRC gates 23A/B has very little physcial space and couldn't do this even if they wanted.

aapee

Finnair pretty much shocked me, boarding AY1341 on one of the bus gates (50J) on Friday. They enforced the Priority Boarding on the right hand side of the gate, and when the bus arrived, they only let the priority passengers to the bus first (some Japanese passengers tried to come to the priority section, but the gate agents asked them to move back to the other side). Only when the priority side got empty they let some of the others to the first bus. Never seen this before.

Edit: never seen this before with Finnair. BA and Ryanair are pretty good at this.

juhanh

I'd add one more thing to prio boarding at bus gates: in cold and really hot/humid climates I really don't want to queue on the tarmac, I'd rather be on the plane/bus.

Rifter

This time the flight was to Madrid and they used only one scanner. I arrived late to the gate and I had to go to the end of the line.

I would be happy to skip the line if the second scanner would be reserved for priority boarding, no separate bus needed. I asked the gate personnel is there priority boarding and the reply was as I described in the initial posting. So instead of using two scanners they used one for all x)

Service by the Spanish crew on flight was also lazy AY1661 on 18th of May. Took 20min to start service in business after seat belt light was off. I also asked for a smoothie but the purser said that unfortunately smoothie is only available in economy class. I guess finnair platinum doesn't get free smoothie in business 😂

When coming back from Madrid there was priority boarding but nobody announced it and there was no signs indicating it. They just started boarding and turned away people from the priority scanner x) that was a mess haha.

The service on the return flight AY1662 on 21st of May on the other hand was very good I have to say. Couldn't be better!

aapee

Second time in a row they enforced the priority boarding now on my LHR flights. AY1331 started boarding early, the left and right sides of gate 53 boarding area were separated and only priority pax allowed to the to the right hand side, allowing them to the plane first. At LHR they also enforced the boarding groups for AY1338 - haven't seen this in ages.