A couple of weeks ago, American Airlines announced a change to their boarding process. Starting on May 1, First and Business class passengers will preboard ahead of group 1, with Concierge Key and families with children.
This preboarding group is essentially an entire new group, unofficially making American’s total number of boarding groups go up to 10.
You read that right. 10 boarding groups. Plus, according to American, flights on Airbus A319/A320 aircraft will get 35 minutes of boarding, while flights on Boeing 737, Airbus A321, and all widebody aircraft will get 40 minutes. That’s a pretty long time.
Here’s a look at their boarding process starting on May 1:
Passengers will hear a lot of announcements, that’s for sure. As I’ve said in recent posts, I’ll be flying on May 1, the first day this new preboarding system will go into effect. I’ll be watching the process closely that day.
With that said, having many boarding groups isn’t really efficient. Here’s an example:
This photo pretty much explains itself. Many domestic airport gates cannot handle the number of passengers boarding a narrowbody plane. Come boarding time, passengers who were in the Admiral’s Club and the final batch of passengers coming through TSA arrive at the gate and just stand around.
Second, when you have so many boarding groups and only one priority lane and one main lane, everybody is crowding into that one lane. Add my previous point about other passengers standing around the gate, and you can see how this mess happens.
In addition, the fight for overhead bin space makes passengers itch to be at the start of their boarding group, again crowding the gate.
All in all, it’s a disaster.
So Why Does American Even Do This?
To put it simply, American Airlines wants its elite passengers to feel important. It’s a status thing more than anything when you board in group 1 or 2 before everyone else. You feel special, and American can deliver on that benefit for elite passengers.
By having more groups, American can incentivize a new boarding group in each status level and add another benefit. It’s like climbing the elite status ladder to go up a single boarding group.
American has shuffled its boarding groups several times in the past. Remember when Executive Platinum used to be in group 2? They’re now in group 1, which no doubt has to do with trying to give more incentives to passengers to climb that elite status ladder.
It’s true that airlines that have 5 boarding groups, for example, will have multiple elite status groups boarding together, or a status group boarding with business class. However, do I really care that my elite status level boards separately from business class? I don’t.
Plus, the inefficiency of having many boarding groups kind of nullifies this benefit for American anyway.
All photos taken by the author except where noted.
