highupinthesky

It's not that easy to enforce priority boarding if the gate scanners doesn't support it. Once the gate scanner have given you a green beep, the gate staff have to let you onboard or manually cancel your boarding. Therefore, in order to enforce priority boarding today, the gate staff have to manually check the boarding card before it's scanned. Depending on whether you boarding card are in your APP, received through SMS, printed you self or printed at an airport machine, you EB status is located different, and your boarding class i located different too. Add to that people who are transferring from another airline with none SAS boarding cards. In short. Enforcing priority boarding will simply take to long and risk delaying the takeoff, or boarding have to start 5-10 min. earlier than today. I don't think any of you would like either.

If SAS want to enforce priority boarding they need to implement boarding groups like UA, and let the gate scanner determine whether you should be allowed to board at this time. To complicate it further, the gate staff have to be able to override the boarding groups at any time in order to let families board together or letting travelers with small kids, older people etc. board before priority boarding.

UA are doing this, so it can be done, but with SAS current IT partner everything is a struggle.

CPH-Flyer

Ah, that is due to a very Scandinavian thing. A policy from management becomes a request from the department head, a memo from the team leader, and finally at the discretion of the employees.

GUWonder

Given what you've considered, what's your "solution"? Is it to hand out Star Gold upgrades for airline employees' friends and family, or something else?

We need to have a big team meeting on this to decide this too, right?

Fredrik74

I don't see why I should have a/the solution. Eivind Roald on the other hand is paid to have solutions.

fassy

Sorry, but that is just exactly the excuse SK is using for years. The UA (or in general North American System) is totally over-engineering a simple solution.

LX, LOT, OS and to some degree LH manage to enforce priority boarding at most of their stations. They call "At this time we board...", the GA takes a short look at the boarding pass or on the computer and nicely tells people if it is not their turn to board. This even works for SK in HAM and HAJ where it doesn't even make sense (bus ride). Sure, there will be some who slip through the check and other who gets rejected, but that happens with the North American boarding zone system as well. Just had a older couple with boarding zone 5 in front of me at EWR. And guess what, the GA said, it's not your turn but just go ahead, will cause more trouble to send you back the line.

I have never been delayed by that.

The key problems from my point of view with SKs struggle to implementing priority boarding is the Scandinavian thing:
- all are equally (bad) treated
- non-confrontational culture, the GAs just do not want to send people away because they do not have status. If the machines (that anonymous thing) tells the pax, that's fine, but please not me.
- the general workforce (organized in powerful unions) dictate how the company does business. If they don't feel comfortable with a new thing (see my first two arguments) it will never happen.

So the only solution is to automate it as much as possible.

FT Guest xyzpdq

fassy completely agree with you on this one. The SK priority boarding at HAM is just hilarious.

A good chunk of my flights out of CPH goes to IAD. Here the GA simply state that boarding can now commence and we invite business class, Plus, Pandioan, Diamond, Gold and *G to board first ^ - but there is no control or even an attempt to enforce this by visual insepction .

The NA system with 5-6 boarding groups and individual lines, signs, etc works well, but is completely over the top. Especially has 50-70% of the aircraft usually falls into the first 2-3 groups.

CPH-Flyer

The one that works fairly well is the AA method, first they call for priority, then the boarding groups one by one. But the Priority AAccess line stays open to people with status can always by pass the general boarding line should they come to the gate later than boarding starts.

FlyingMoose

Employees don't get to pick which company rules they like and enforce. If SK has a priority boarding policy in place and staff doesn't enforce it because of opinions, they should be fired. I'm pretty sure your employer won't let you selectively pick the rules you like and which ones you don't.

Indeed, the AA system works well. In case of SK there should really only have to be 3 groups.

- Business + Diamond/Gold
- Plus + Silver
- Rest

Just make sure that no next group in-line starts to board before the other group has completed and keep a premier line open for folks from the first group that arrive late.

A very simple enhancement that will be another step into the direction of becoming a real airline that caters to a global audience.

fassy

Same for UA. If you walk up late as boarding group 1 or 2 eligible you can use that to cut into the general boarding to the head of the line. At some smaller airports where they do not have enough space to put the queues up to facilitate that doesn't work, but for the rest it does.

SK2751

I think even just two lines would do: priority and regular. And keep the priority line open throughout the time like many airlines do also in Europe (AF anybody? KL?). On long haul Business and Plus do not really compete for space, and on short haul there is no Business, so I think two lines would work sufficiently well, and would be easily enforceable. And a clear sign in the gate, instead of an hidden mode in the electronic machine, would discourage many pax from taking the wrong line (and reduce the issues that staff has sending people back).

FlyingMoose

I referred to groups, not lines. Two lines would indeed be enough, premier and non-premier. That would still allow for boarding in 3 groups.

GUWonder

Various other airlines at CPH seem to be able to somewhat control priority boarding. And some of those other airlines also have Scandinavian GAs -- just not those working for SAS. So then is the difference the passengers? But then there are routes where SAS competes with other carriers that do somewhat patrol for priority boarding.

highupinthesky

This thread alone shows how complex priority boarding is. Just look at all the different opinions about how a good priority boarding system should be structured.

@Fassy.
I've never seen anyone who jumped queue being turned down at LH, LX, OS etc. I think the only reason it works there is because of the German mentality, where as the Nordic mentality unfortunately are becoming more like the Asian "me first". In other words. Your Germans are more disciplined than us in the cold nord, so a lot less people try to jump queue in the airports in Germany, and that's why priority boarding seems to work there.

@GuWonder.
Which airlines in CPH do you believe have a working priority boarding?

@generel.
First of all, I don't like the physical lines UA have. I don't like them on the SAS long hauls in US either. If you don't have the space to do proper separation of people, then don't do it. Just announce when it's time for the next group to board instead of the stupid physical lines, which are always in the way, and blocked with passengers who are in a later boarding group. By putting the boarding group on your boarding card, it's clear to everyone that if you are in boarding group 4 there are no reason to be waiting at the gates when boarding group 1 starts to board. If it's the automated gates which won't let you through, you quickly learn that it doesn't make sense to try to jump queue, but if it's a human, you might get lucky next time, so why not try.

The goal of any boarding system is to minimize the time it takes to board. A proper priority boarding system will have to be able to handle all types of aircraft. Part of the boarding system my not be used when not needed, but to make it effective and easy to understand the frame of the priority boarding system have to be the same across all types of aircraft's at an airline.
IMHO a proper priority boarding systems would have one or two groups for those with priority like First, Business, Plus/Premium Economy, EBD, EBG and *A gold. The only reason to 2 groups would be to give Diamond priority over everyone else, like the UA global. There are no reason to split Business and plus, as they will go in different directions once they pass through the door at the long haul planes, and on short hauls only plus is available.
Economy class you want to split into multiple groups depending on the size of the plane. Even on the A320's and Boeing 737's it make sense to have at least 2 groups, so the passenger at the back boards before the passenger at the front. On the A330/A340's 3 or 4 groups might be the best option.
On planes where you are bused to the plane I would like to see separate buses for priority and eco. They do this in Asia, to an extent where everyone with priority can sit in the bus. There are no standing in the priority bus.

I agree that SAS could do more to enforce priority boarding, but with the Nordic "me first" mentality I don't really see how priority boarding would be any good unless we let the machine decide whether it's time for you to board now or not. This way it will also be possible to use the automatic gates for priority boarding. There are installed at least two of those at almost all gates in all major airport in Germany and DK. I strongly believe that cleaver use of those automatic gates together with at proper priority boarding system with boarding groups on your boarding card, will reduce boarding time.

fassy

No, the difference is the management of those Scandinavian FAs telling them to do a proper job while at SAS it seems we see the typical Swedish "ah, we can't really force anyone to do anything he/she doesn't like"-mentality. I worked for a rather big Swedish company and they were the same, one reason why I left. Being a manager of a group of people but having no way of really managing their performance is kind of a bad job.

I also work for a different Swedish company where the leadership team did a great job 5 years ago to fight this mentality and now they behave like a US based organization and everybody speaks their mind. True, sometimes peoples opinion collide, but that has mostly some healthy outcome for the company in the end.

Might be that a German is more likely to follow "ze rulz" and if they call for priority boarding people just stand back but I see the LH, LX, LO and OS agents enforcing it pretty often and sending people back. Funny enough OS even in CPH for the CPH-VIE flight. I do fly quite abit on LH group airlines...

FlyingMoose

I wouldn't make that differentiation. In general Swedes are borderline autistic when it comes to following rules and queueing and they are taught from inception how to behave and act.

However, as soon as there is an opportunity to play the "equality"-card it all goes up in the air for some reason. Same thing with entering and exiting public transportation. In 99% of cases the group trying to enter the bus/subway/train will stand in front of the door being all confused about people also exiting who get in their way. In most other civilised countries people entering make room for those exiting first. In certain of those countries they have an unnecessary amount of markers and indicators (or even have people yelling those instructions as a day job) to enforce that behaviour.

Never understood why such basic things are so challenging to comply with for Swedes. I can't see how your equality is violated if someone exits a train before you enter. Especially when the laws of nature prevent you from entering and exiting at the same time.