I listened to a radio interview many years ago with a physicist who had done simulations to find the optimal boarding strategy. Once he explained it it was totally obvious. The biggest time waster is waiting for people in front of you to finish putting up their luggage so that they step out of the ail and you can get to your seat. The boarding strategy most airlines employ of boarding people at the same time who sit in the same part of the plane minimizes opportunities for passengers to put their luggage away in parallel. So it's actually a actively negative boarding strategy. Boarding in random order would be better. Ideally you would space people out from different sections if the airplane and within reach group someone from the back of the plane would board first. They'd all arrive at their seats in parallel and start putting their luggage up at the same time and then the next group repeats the procedure. I think what Southwest does is interesting because it leaves the process in essence to the passengers. I've seen it go both ways where someone takes the first free seat and starts putting up their luggage, blocking everyone else from making progress. Sometimes people are great and walk by available seats top the middle and now people can start putting their stuff away in parallel.

Ever since I listened to that I cannot stop thinking about it when boarding is slow and get upset about the airline making things actively inefficient. A friend made the good point though that a likely reason for the process being chosen despite actively wasting time is that it feels intuitively efficient to most passengers and keeps them happy.

Mythbusters also did a segment on boarding efficiency. Their conclusion that "back to front" boarding was the slowest, and "no assigned seats" was the fastest, but that passengers hated boarding with no assigned seats. Window-middle-aisle boarding was second-fastest.

My experience is that American passengers are just terrible. Planes here in Japan board so quickly in comparison, with a standard back-to-front boarding.

Is it accurate to say that Japanese are just used to orderly boarding in general? I haven't visited yet but just watching the amount of order and efficiency at train stations on YouTube is crazy compared to the US.

In my limited experience from boosting Japan I'd say that Japanese public life is generally much more organized than in the US.

At the train station there are markings indicating were the doors of the train are gonna be and people line up at the markings. It makes it really easy to pick a good spot to wait for the train and makes boarding so much less stressful. At least for me. In SF train stops I'd always be strategizing where to position myself and keep repositioning as more waiting passengers are bunching up in certain areas. I'm crazy that way. So Japan was very relaxing for me.

Anecdotally, boarding speed is not my major complaint - failing to secure an aisle seat, however, is.

Fast boarding speeds lowers their cost. That's one of the reasons Southwest can often be much cheaper than other airlines.

Is Southwest often that much cheaper? I usually only fly them because they're direct where others are not, but it usually doesn't save me money.

I guess our mileage literally does vary, but I almost always find Southwest to be among the cheapest options for short domestic flights.

Or just do it like Ryanair and always use two doors. With a 737 and two doors in use, any aircraft is boarded in less than 5 min.

Any time I fly I try to get the lowest possible fare by using priceline/kayak/whatever. Southwest never comes up among the lowest prices.

Southwest only sells tickets directly (another way they keep fares low) and they don't share flight data with Kayak/Priceline/etc..

If Southwest covers your route, their fares are almost always going to be competitive with the lowest price. Where Southwest is not good is when you have longer flights (cross country) which will almost always entail stops and or changing planes. But it is great for short stuff like flying between OAK/LAX/SFO/PHX/LAS.

Exactly!

The seat upgrade procedure is pretty nice. $20 for priority boarding on southwest vs. multiple times that for a "economy deluxe" seat on other airlines? Sign me up.

It also would seem to mean they can either schedule flights closer together or have additional buffer to prevent cascading flight delays, either of which is a win.