Last month I shared that there’s an American Airlines gate agent in Dallas who doesn’t think the airline goes far enough to police passengers who crowd the gate and try to board before it’s their turn. Early boarders get rejected with an audible tone. But this ‘gate lice’ still wastes everyone’s time in line.
So they’ve started announcing that anyone who tries to board before their group is called will have their carry-on bags forcibly checked.
And this renegade gate agent is developing a following. The practice is spreading – across airlines even. Perhaps because of all of the positive attention they’ve gotten!
A Delta Air Lines gate agent at New York JFK is now doing this, too.
This morning I had a short hop from JFK. During zone 1 boarding, the GA told 2 people “you board out of order, your bag gets checked.” There was no option given to wait for their turn, the tags were printed, affixed, and instructions given to leave them.
No pink tags, full up “take your ass to baggage claim” sentence. Another GA actually walked down the jet bridge to ensure they were left. I heard her say to the boarding agent “we can’t see past that last turn, so I did what I had to do.”
Keeping people out of line until it’s their turn to board, and keeping passengers from slowing down the boarding process, benefits everyone.
- Gate agents often require passengers to check their carry-on bags even when there’s still overhead bin space on board. They want to prevent the need to bring any bags off the aircraft when passengers find there’s no more space. That takes critical minutes right before the aircraft’s doors are supposed to close, and they don’t want to be yelled at for missing an exactly on-time departure.
- These agent figure, why not transfer that burden from later-boarding passengers onto the ones trying to skip the line? There’s a certain justice in it, since the only reason to board early is to get that precious overhead bin space in the first place.
Comments on this blog and elsewhere across the internet have been almost universally positive for these rogue agents, taking a real problem of incivility at the gate – which makes the travel experience worse for everyone – into their own hands. If their airline isn’t going to solve it, these heroes will.