Easyjet strange procedure at Newcastle
 

Came home with Easyjet from Newcastle to Stansted a few days ago. Now I'm used to Easy (and other low costs) checking your photo-id at the gate to ensure the person checked and shown on the boarding card is is the person travelling, presumably as a revenue protection measure.

However it was announced that the gate that BCs would be uplifted at the desk upstairs, but photo-ids would be inspected at the foot of the stairs. Which they were.

Can anyone tell me what this achieves ?

Valid id for destination ? No, an internal flight.

Reconciles id with boarding card name ? No, the two were never looked at together.

Probably a case of the pax handling team making life easy for themselves as the computer for reconciling the boarding cards is upstairs. That means that they can establish whether anybody is missing from the flight without running up and down stairs, or leaving passengers to wander down the stairs and out to the aircraft unsupervised.

Shouldn't stop them checking the details on the small stub of the boarding card against your ID on the way out to the aircraft.

The booking and ID checks did not work too well today at STN. A Passenger was sent back from the gate to check in. Seemed to have been checked in for the early Glasgow flight by mistake, and was supposed to be on the later one. I can only imagine that happening if there was somone with the same name on each flight. I guess the other passenger had not made check in in anycase!

In fairness ID is pretty usless if your flights for the day all happen to be full of the annual John / Joanne Smith club outing...

If all check-in staff checked the Ref number against the mainfest this would not happen. Or checked they had correct ticket for the flight.

You can have 200 Mr John Doe's on the flight but they will all have different ref numbers.

Mistakes do happen.

On my recent LH flights between DUS and PMI there were no i/d checks whatsover either at check-in or at the gate, and of course no passport control either because of the Schengen agreement.