Duplicate boarding position
 

So before you ask, I did do a search and the only thing I found was a thread from 2016. So I had to do a short notice trip DAL-DCA and because it was short notice I booked BS. Checked in +24 on the outbound and got position A2, cool. Yesterday I checked in +24 and five minutes because I was landing at DCA about that time, got A1. Very cool, first time ever. But when I boarded this morning there was a lady standing at the front of the line like she owned it. I stepped up beside her and hung out, notice on her paper boarding pass that she was also A1. Guess I was not that special but was certainly not going to say anything. Given there were a ton of pre boards I knew I was not going to get my usual preferred bulkhead seat so whatever. However it begs the question, how in the everything computerized systems are their duplicate boarding positions? Not that I care that much about A1 vs A2 but I am a computer guy and wonder......

Over 500 flights and have never seen that.
Are you sure she wasn't holding her cxn bp?
That I have seen.

Possible I guess.

But - there are lots of other possibilities.

It could have been for the wrong flight.
She could have had that originally, then changed, and changed back to that flight, but still as the old/original BP.
Could be photoshopped.

Could be....

Worst case scenario: She kept her "paper boarding pass" from another run and the scanner didn't reject it.

Or she quickly gave the CORRECT boarding pass when she got up there.

Occam's razor: Southwest's crack IT systems "glitched" and generated duplicate boarding positions.

I have seen this before. Admittedly not A1, but still. I discovered lining up that myself and another passenger both had the same late-A boarding position (around A45ish if I remember correctly). My first thought was that the other guy was on the wrong flight. Then, that maybe I was -- perhaps I'd missed a gate change or something. But no, both BPs were for the same flight. He was traveling with his wife, who had the next position behind us. We had both bought EBCI, and neither of us had made any recent changes to anything. That was about as far as we got comparing notes.

I was vaguely worried about the 2nd pass not scanning. I went first (he was behind me, with his wife), and I hung back to see if he had any issues. Both of our passes scanned and neither of us had any issue boarding. We pointed out our duplicate positions to the agent, who basically laughed it off with a comment that she hoped it didn't cause her count to be off. There didn't seem to be any issue as we left more or less on time with no manual recount.

I thought all the things brought up but no, it was for the same flight as I checked the flight number and she scanned the one showing A1 fine and I scanned my phone fine and we both boarded. As I said I was not going to bring it up because it just didn't matter from the perspective of who gets on first but rather I would have assumed "the computer" would not have allowed it. I love "the computer", back when I flew AA the blamed virtually everything that went wrong on "the computer".

With Southwest, it's "glitch." ;)

This happened on one of my flights today, I had A33, girl in front of me had A32 and two individuals, one younger lady and one older one both had A31, both for the same flight. The younger one went first and apparently she was on the flight but wasn't checked in, so she had to go back to the podium. The older lady's A31 BP scanned just fine. Don't know what that was all about but lots of people on this flight (including me) were from other cancelled flights.

Young lady was using the A31 BP from the cancelled flight would be my guess.

The one true way to see if they are duplicates is to look at the passenger number in the upper right corner. A1 should be 1, A2 should be 2 etc. If this person upgraded to BS at the gate, it certainly could cause a duplicate A1. If that was the case, the pax number should be something other than 1. To my knowledge this isn't visible on the mobile BPs.

If the BS numbers are unused, the boarding pass issued could have a pax number <15. The pax numbers can't be more than 143 on a 737-700 or 175 on the 800s.

My other half just had this happen - upgraded to A1 at the gate, met another fellow with A1 in line. Both were definitely for the correct segment. He didn't ask the guy if he'd booked BS or just upgraded.

Had this happen in Phoenix last week heading the BNA, two people had A6.

With Airtran it was a glitch on same seats. It all comes down to how they timestamp things. They can do it by seconds or any fraction there of. 1/1000 isn't good enough to prevent this entirely.