freQ

Since the airport I fly out of is pretty small I can't really fly on the same airline a lot. I usually end up on Delta, but I fly a lot of the legacy and discount carriers as well. I usually go off of price and itinerary/convenience.

I have been in several situations where:

I can't hear the gate agent (or they talk like an auctioneer)
My zone is never called (this has happened multiple times in the past month)
They forget to call people in basic economy (I'm pretty cheap, so I'm in this zone a lot)
People rush the gate and have to be turned away because it's not their zone (people in coach trying to board with first class passengers)
And, with Delta, people ignore the zone lane dividers (I've seen this many times in ATL) and board before people who were lined up.

At my airport they don't put what zone is boarding on the screen, so you have to listen for the gate agent. Sometimes the screen is just turned off.

When did boarding a plane become so complicated? Back in the day (about 10 years ago) it seemed to go much more smoothly.

Nothing I've listed here has affected my life adversely, but it seems like we've over engineered waiting in line.

rickg523

Baggage fees. It's not the seat - that's assigned. It's the fact that the bins can never accommodate all the caary-ons people are using to save $200 (family of four, r/t, one checked bag each).
People are in a rush to get space for their stuff.

deniah

I don't remember it being any different over a decade ago, before the nickel dining on baggage fees and ultra-economy fares.

People gravitate towards the boarding scrum. Herd mentality. Has always been that way.

lhrsfo

True but I do believe that it has got worse. Ten years ago it was rare to have to gate check - now it's a large number of people on every flight. It's also why boarding takes so much longer now.

freQ

Maybe as I've gotten older I've become more cognizant of other people hahaha (aka grumpy)

I end up gate checking my bag a lot, but I bought the cheapest fare so I know it's probably going to happen. On UA you don't even get to use the bins in BE.

Kevin AA

I like the old boarding system of rows 35 and higher, rows 30 and higher, etc. I can understand why airlines board by zone now ($$$) but it just doesn't work as well, as we can all see. If airlines make X dollars by selling a better boarding zone but lose Y dollars on a longer boarding time, is X>Y? Hmmm...

Southwest is the opposite. They got rid of the line campers with the A-B-C numbered boarding system. Actually they've always had a numbered boarding system but they didn't care if 1-30 boarded in that exact order, which led to people camping out, first to get a boarding card, then to sit in the group of 30 to board. The numbered posts you stand next to for a short period of time works great.

AMflier

I completely agree. No other US carrier boards as quickly as WN. I suspect that the free checked bags also helps.

Nhilar

A fool and his checked bag are soon parted...well these days it seems to be rare to see a truely lost bag, but theft and rifling are still very very common, and honestly it makes me pack more efficiency.

rickg523

There's that.
But I think a lot of people taking shorter flights don't like having to wait for their checked bags. They've already shown up an hour early, maybe an hour and a half with parking; add waiting for a checked bag on arrival, before grabbing a ride or a rental for the 45 minute drive downtown and that 2 hour flight just turned into the whole afternoon.