United Airlines is changing its boarding process for economy passengers, and your seat preference—window, middle, or aisle—could determine how quickly you are allowed on the plane.
According to an internal memo, the airline will be switching to a boarding system in economy that will follow a window, middle, aisle seat order, or WILMA in industry parlance.
The new process will go into effect on most United flights on October 26. Here’s how it will work: When economy boarding starts, passengers with a window seat will board in Group 3, along with fliers in exit row seats. Next up will be economy fliers with middle seats, who will be in boarding in Group 4. The last regular economy passengers on the aircraft will be fliers with seats along the aisle, who will be assigned Group 5 on their boarding passes.
The new process will also accommodate fliers traveling with companions—multiple customers on the same economy reservation, like families or partners traveling together, will be assigned the same and highest boarding group number. The only exception is passengers in basic economy.
All basic economy fliers, regardless of seat assignment, will be pushed to the newly established Group 6, the final group and the last passengers to get on the plane.
There will be no change in the boarding system for pre-boarding groups like active military or disabled passengers, or for business class, first class, and fliers with elite status.
The airline has boarded its planes using the WILMA method in the past, but stopped the process in 2017 in favor of a standard front-to-back approach. However, the airline’s memo says that since 2019, United’s average boarding times have increased by two minutes, as a result of which, it has been researching a way to streamline its protocol again.
United tested the WILMA process at four boarding points at unnamed domestic airports, including one of its major hubs, and reports that it’s a faster procedure, shaving the extra two minutes off of boarding times. Those two minutes are crucial for both the airline and for passengers, as a departure running behind by even that amount of time can cause tarmac delays that throw off passengers’ travel plans and become costly for carriers.
US airlines are always tinkering with the boarding process to see if it can be smoother or more profitable. JetBlue used to be known for boarding passengers with a quicker back-to-front method—a system it briefly revived during the pandemic to reduce the amount of time passengers were standing in the aisles. Southwest, too, has its open-seating boarding system in which passengers board by group but are free to pick the first available seat that appeals to them. That process is about 47 percent faster than traditional boarding, according to flight search platform CheapAir.com. Even so, Southwest has experimented with ways to make its process more efficient by testing a boarding procedure that opened both the front and rear doors for passengers at a handful of airports—although that option never seemed to catch on across its fleet.
But in general, airlines today stick to a front-to-back, row-by-row procedure because it is simply more lucrative. Priority boarding is usually seen as an added perk for passengers who buy more expensive premium seats, spend enough on an airline’s co-branded credit cards to earn elite status, or separately purchase early boarding access—a major boon for Southwest’s bottomline in particular.
Indeed, many passengers are willing to pay more to be among the first to board with access to overhead bin space for any carry-on items. But if you’re an economy flier who doesn’t want to hand over more money, now you can just opt for the window seat.