Qantas: Priority Boarding – better luck this time

Qantas promises Priority boarding as a benefit to frequent flyers at gold and above level, as well as Qantas Club members.

The reality is, its sometimes hard to work out which is the priority queue, and it seems at the discretion of the check-in staff as to whether you get priority.

Sometimes the priority queue is longer than the ordinary queue.

I thought it was just me

Now, a long time ago, I decided it was just me – who adores privilege – that got huffy about this, and I should just let it go . . . until I read scads of other people on airline chat forums who also felt aggrieved at Qantas’s inability to police this privilege.

Qantas first introduced priority boarding as a domestic privilege in 2011, and contributors to chat forums have been complaining about it ever since.

Qantas takes action

Well Qantas is promising to take action as of next Monday 25 November, when it will (why does this word fill me with dread?) ‘enhance’ its domestic priority boarding process, so it will work better for frequent flyers.

What they gonna do?

Starting in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth from next Monday, and rolled out nationwide in the rest of 2020, they will implement a procedure that will be in line with their international boarding process.

That means chucking out of the priority queue anyone who doesn’t qualify and boarding everyone in the priority queue before commencing with general boarding.

2PAXfly Takeout

Qantas staff are very good at saying ‘No’ sometimes: so this should come to some flight attendants naturally, which begs the question of why has it taken so long for Qantas to sort this out?

Well, I shall put this to the test in Sydney and Adelaide next week and report back on how the ‘agile training’ Qantas promised to implement in it’s statement to investors this week is progressing.