09 MAR 2017: I have recently come to the conclusion that it is a distinct sign you’re getting old when so many things in life just seem so much more complicated today than they used to be “back in the day.”

Take airline boarding processes for instance: Well for starters, it never used to be any kind of a ‘process’, it just, well, it just kind of flowed. You’d have the “Families with small children” advance group and that was about it.  In most cases it would be a simple back to front in groups of maybe ten rows at a time and, as my dad used to like to say, “Bob’s your uncle”, you were boarded and ready to go.  The “Bob” thing did, I must confess, confuse me a lot as a kid, because Jack and Jim were my uncles … but I digress…

Given the wonders that technology has bestowed on air travel, it’s really quite incredible that, despite constant attempts to crack the code, the boarding processes of just about every major airline have managed to go nowhere. And in recent years, with some carriers, they may even have regressed.

Take for instance the “new simplified boarding process” that American Airlines launched with great fanfare on March 1st  – it consists of no fewer than NINE groups. I mean come on. Four is simplified – nine is just asking for trouble! Here’s what AA considers simple:

•    Group 1 – Active US military and Business Class passengers (on a two-class international flight

•    Group 2 – Executive Platinum, Oneworld Emerald and business class on a three-class aircraft

•    Group 3 – Platinum Pro, Platinum and Oneworld Saphire

•    Group 4 – Now this is where it starts to get fun – this fourth group has Gold, Oneworld Ruby, Alaska Airlines MVP Members, Citi/AA Executive card members and (I love this one) “Customers who purchased Priority Boarding” – that’s right, they paid for priority and got group four!

•    Group 5 – ‘Main Cabin Extra’ (extra what exactly is not clear), ‘Eligible AAdvantage credit card members’ (clearly some such card holders are deemed ineligible) and ‘eligible corporate travellers’.

•    Groups 6, 7 and 8 are, well, everyone else that hasn’t managed to identify with the first five.  I’m prepared to guess that on most flights this group accounts for maybe (at best) 20 percent of the total passengers.

And then – bringing up the rear – comes Group 9.

This, “Number Nine, Number Nine, Number Nine…” ranking is earned by those passengers who have purchased American’s new Basic Economy fare: That’s AA’s token attempt to compete with the ultra low fare brigade.

As a ‘basic’ ticket holder, in addition to boarding last and being assigned your seat at the gate, you are not entitled to use the overhead bins – which is kind of meaningless given that, as the last people to board, you wouldn’t have been able to find any space there anyway.

On a quick fare check, Basic was hard to find but, on one Charlotte to Philadelphia flight, it was all of $20 less than the Main Cabin folks had paid to be in groups 6, 7 and 8 – with rights to lord it over group-niners by using the overhead bins.

Ironically, the most time-consuming part of boarding an airplane is not getting people into their seats – it’s the ugly ritual of trying to stuff oversize wheelies into undersize bins. The smart way to do it can be found on carriers like Spirit and Frontier that charge more to put a wheelie-on bag in the overhead than they do for checking it in. This creates an incentive to take less rather than more on board and, “Bob’s your father’s brother” – the boarding process is faster.

So what is the best way to do it?  If setting expectations and consistently meeting them is the key to good customer service, then any procedure that is logical, easily understood and predictable for the passenger gets my vote.  Paying for priority boarding and being in group four does not qualify on any of these counts.

Boarding by row, six or seven rows at a time, as is still practiced by many carriers has to be the winner – even if it is old fashioned and devoid of the expensive, algorithmic, artificial intelligence that created American’s latest gate area free-for-all.

There again, Southwest Airlines, the carrier that has turned a profit for 43 consecutive years and whose business model relies on fast turn times, has doggedly stuck to their overly simplistic, first-come-first-to board system: That must tell us something.

Nobody ever said commercial aviation was easy to figure out!