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By Marketing Strategist & AI Tools
Why Airline Boarding Makes No Sense (And What Your Customer Journey Should Learn From It) Here's how you know your customer experience is broken: if you're...
Here's how you know your customer experience is broken: if you're making people wait in line for something they already paid for, you're doing it wrong.
A decade marketing big and small brands taught me this watching passengers at Nashville International Airport last month. Everyone has a seat. Everyone has a ticket. Yet somehow, we've created this elaborate theater where people crowd around gate B12 like they're fighting for concert tickets.
The airline already has your money. Your seat isn't going anywhere. But they've trained you to stand in a sweaty cluster for twenty minutes because... zone 3 might run out?
Your business probably does the same thing.
Airlines have convinced us that boarding groups matter. Zone 1, Zone 2, Priority Access, General Boarding - it's all made-up urgency for a process that could work in any order.
Southwest figured this out decades ago. No assigned seats, no boarding zones, no theater. Just get on the plane. Their customers are happier and their turnaround times are faster. But every other airline keeps the complicated system because it makes people feel like they're getting something special when they pay for priority boarding.
Your customer journey probably has the same fake complexity. How many steps could you eliminate tomorrow if you stopped trying to create artificial scarcity or premium feelings?
Drive down Cool Springs Boulevard and you'll notice something. The businesses that last don't make you jump through hoops. Taziki's doesn't have a "premium ordering zone." The Franklin Farmers Market doesn't make you wait in different lines based on how much you're spending.
Basically it means this: the more successful businesses make it easier to give them money, not harder.
But somehow when we design our websites, email sequences, and sales processes, we forget this. We create boarding groups where none need to exist.
There are two kinds of business owners. One who adds steps to make their service feel premium. One who removes steps to make their service feel easy.
The first thinks complexity equals value. More forms to fill out, more qualifying questions, more hoops to jump through. They're creating boarding zones for a plane with assigned seats.
The second knows that easy wins. Their customers can buy faster, start faster, get results faster. They've eliminated the gate clustering entirely.
A billion dollars in marketing spend taught me that every extra click, every additional form field, every "just one more step" costs you customers. Not because people are lazy, but because unnecessary friction feels disrespectful.
Next time you're designing a customer experience, think about airline boarding. Ask yourself:
Does this step actually matter, or am I just creating zones?
If someone already decided to buy from you, why are you making them prove they deserve it? If they already trust you enough to give you their email, why do you need three more confirmation steps?
Your checkout process shouldn't feel like boarding a plane to Atlanta. It should feel like walking into Prince's Hot Chicken - you know what you want, you order it, you get it.
The businesses thriving in Franklin understand this. They've eliminated the boarding announcements and just opened the plane doors. Their customers walk straight to their seats while their competitors are still organizing zones that don't need to exist.
Stop making your customers stand in line for something they already earned the right to have.