Has VA given up on priority boarding?

[Mattg]

I’ve usually found that priority boarding works well on Virgin Australia. Unfortunately, not so on my last couple of flights.

I was flying out of BNE last Friday night. The gate agent announced that boarding would be in two stages, with priority boarding called first. She then simply invited everyone in the vicinity of the gate area to board through the priority lane, regardless of whether they were entitled to priority boarding. About a minute later, they also started boarding through the general lane, even though there were still lots of people waiting in the “priority” line.

This morning, flying out of CNS, they did at least board the priority lane first. But once again, many of the people in the priority lane were not entitled to priority boarding and the gate agent made no effort to turn anyone away.

I never thought I’d see the day when Qantas consistently did priority boarding better than Virgin, but I think we may be there?

What are other people’s recent experiences with priority boarding on Virgin Australia?

 

[RooFlyer]

No problem in my recent flights ex HBA and MEL.

HBA can be a bit fraught because of crowding at the gate but surprisingly the crowd tends to hold back rather than push forward for priority.

At MEL the physical separation of the priority queue area and the general boarding area seems to take care of the issue there, too.

 

[Saab34]

I’ve always found those airports with third party staff, ie CNS, care factor is somewhat reduced at times.

 

[kerfuffle]

Worked fine yesterday afternoon at BNE but did feel like half the plane had priority boarding. I've also seen it enforced when general boarding is already well underway and I rock up in the priority lane

 

[Harrison_133]

Apart from some occasional blips, they've been pretty consistent with priority on most of my many VA flights over the last 12 months. Or at least, I've had no memorable priority boarding "fails" of late.

In my experience, the worst offender for sub-par priority is Brisbane starting general boarding a bit too soon.

More recently though, I've been at the back of some pretty long priority lines on flights out of Melbourne and Sydney and it's still been enforced well. On each occasion, they've held back the general lane until priority was clear.

In saying that, I do agree with @Mattg, they don't really make much of an effort anymore to turn ineligible guests away from the priority lane. That could do with some improvement.

 

[Stealthflyer]

All my flights out of HBA and MEL have had priority boarding enforced as always. As @RooFlyer noted, the HBA queues are more like crowds, but it still seems to work somehow. I’ve observed that the VA staff aren’t afraid to yell out instructions to waiting passengers at HBA. That usually sorts us out.