It really is an interesting social experiment to watch the
passenger herding patterns about 20 minutes before boarding a plane. Prior to
this mysterious 20 minute mark most people are sitting calmly in the gate area
reading magazines, thumb typing on smart phones, playing electronic games, and
for the most part keeping to themselves. At about 22 minutes before the
scheduled boarding time some odd spell takes over and people begin to shuffle
toward the boarding lanes. Here’s where things get interesting. Most airlines
now have some form of a zone numbering system. All the Zone 1 passengers go
first, followed by Zone 2, etc. until the plane is boarded. For some odd
reason, a significant number of passengers feel compelled to ignore the
numbering process and elbow themselves to the front of the line.
Sure, we could remind these elbowers that we’re all going to
the same place (doesn’t seem to matter to them). We could politely inform them
they need to wait until their number is called (suddenly they don’t understand
English). We could ignore them and see if they make it through the gate agent
out of sequence (my personal favorite…I’ve noted the elbowers succeed about 30%
of the time!). Or we could develop a better plan.
I’m not sure what works best for boarding the plane. It
doesn’t seem to matter if an airline tries to load from back to front or load
the window seats first followed by the middle and then the aisle. No matter the
approach, the elbowers are lurking to get a jump on getting ahead of the line.
The best system I’ve seen for handling the elbowers is at
the United Airlines terminal in Hong Kong. (Note: I’m an United frequent flyer
and the ONLY place I’ve seen this done is Hong Kong. United, are you listening?
Check out your gate agents in Hong Kong. They. Are. Amazing.). At the gate in
Hong Kong there are designated areas for each of the zone numbers. It’s simple,
the gate agents use the retractable queuing tape and create an area for the
people in each zone to mill about. The brilliance of the system is the agent
walks among the passengers, looks at their boarding pass, and makes sure they
are in the proper zone. This completely avoids the massive clustering that
takes place otherwise and people seem to actually be willing to comply to be
placed somewhere while they wait for their turn. I’m certain there is still
some elbowing that takes place within each holding area, but it’s contained
within each zone.
Somehow, someway, all the ticketed passengers ultimately get
on the plane. While the process can get frustrating, it helps to take a big
yoga breath and try to relax because watching the whole process can actually be
quite entertaining.
Looking forward to hear about other interesting queuing
processes.
Until next time,
Kari On and Keep Traveling
