Boarding gate on airport websites
 

(Almost) Every airport of more than trivial size has a website with a page showing flights departing in the next few hours. The terminal and checkin desk are usually shown, but boarding gate is very rarely shown on the public website

Almost everyone flying has a phone with a web browser. The gate info is available to everyone in the departures area, so clearly not particularly secret or a security risk. For those in a hurry or with their hands full (eg with kids running around) it makes it that bit more awkward to be forced to find a display screen. So why do airports consistently make it difficult to see gate info on their website ? I'm sure I'm not the first person to think this... and wondering what the good reason is...

The gate info in departures is typically not available to the passengers until 30 minutes before boarding because the airport / airline does not want departing passengers at the gate before then.

Often because with (say) easyJet a flight is only on the ground "turning round" for 45 minutes so they (or somebody else) are probabaly using the gate for a different flight up to about 45 minutes before a particular flight departs and they don't want confusion, overcrowding or passengers loitering in the corridors.

Additionally, the UK mostly has "closed" gaterooms which require handling agent staff to check the passengers boarding passes and passports before letting them into the gateroom (in the US they have open gaterooms and the checks are done just as passengers board). As those are the same staff who operated the check-in, they won't be at the gateroom until check-in has closed, which is almost when the passengers are scheduled to board.

A final reason is because there are often last minute gate changes as an aircraft arrives, because for a whole host of reasons a departing aircraft may not vacate a stand when it was planned to, so stand allocation can be a very dynamic business.

I completely understand gate info will not be definitive until maybe an hour before departure, and the airport wants pax spending money in shops until then
However, once it is less than an hour before departure... why could this not appear on the airport website ?

Is this true nowadays? What airports still have them? LHR has some at T3 after T2B was so build then changed to open plan. I think LGW has them on on Pier 2 only nowadays since North was refurbished. Any others still in existence?

Dave's correct. Same staff man check-in and gateroom and can only be in one place at a time and don't want pax at gateroom until staff are ready to check them into it.

All gaterooms at Gatwick are closed .. staff check your documents before you get into the gateroom.

All that is well and good, but sometimes the time between the gate being displayed on the tv screen and the closure of the gate is very short if you're not an olympic sprinter ... Ryanair gates 40-53 at Stansted or gates 100-119 at Gatwick including that bridge!

davidjohnson6

More time at the gate, less time in duty free buying oversized bags of M&Ms and 200s sleeves of Rothmans

Here in the USA all airport website that I have visited always show the gate number. Available many hours before the flight. Even better, the airlines websites show it too. My boarding pass, either printed, Apple Wallet or the airline app, shows it. Heck, I just enter the airline code and flight number into Google and it spits out everything, including gate #.

I looked at Manchester, London City and Gatwick websites. Manchester seems to show gates for all flights, the other two, only for soon to be boarded flights. So you do have a valid point.

Pardon my ignorance, but in the USA we all congregate & wait right at the actual gate where the jet ramp is, all open to coming and going. My limited travel to the UK has me remembering that there is some sort of common area for many flights and only when it is near flight time is the actual gate area w/boarding jetway, that is near the common area is announced & used? Is that what you refer to as a "gateroom"?

That said, I rarely use any airport website for arrivals / departure info with so many other ways to find it. Mostly I use it to check all flights when I schedule my own plane flying so I don't have to wait 20 minutes idling at the hold short line waiting for landings and departure airliners.

At some airports there is a large room, usually with loads of seating, dedicated to a single gate. Staff check boarding cards and others documents on entry to the room but you can usually then go no further, initially at least, so you wait there until the aircraft is ready for boarding - at which point the doors at the exit end of the room which lead to the jetty proper are opened and you can head on board.

Used to be common at Gatwick, not sure about now and not so much so at Heathrow these days.

Is it as simple as not wanting to link internal airport systems used by handling agents and the like with the public, outward facing website?

Been there
 

The only reason it’s not often displayed online is because it’s technically somewhat challenging given the systems involved.

We implemented this for Leeds Bradford, it’s totally doable but we ended up having to get a feed out from the flight information display system to do so which was a bit of a pain.

In the last year before I quit working I 'commuted' every weekend between Bristol and Glasgow (sometimes Edi) with Easy Jet,sometimes we were standing in the 'Gate' and check-in had closed before the Aircraft had even landed LOL,which meant that as soon as the Aircraft was 'turned round' - we were on board tout suite - much to the amusement of us regular travellers and the bemusement/confusion of the irregular travellers.

SWBKCB

Could be..

Certainly when I was working we could see the planned gate on a company app well ahead of boarding…(several hours).

We could also see when it had all gone Pete Thong and a gate change was in the offing……..and I suspect that was why the info didn’t go into the public domain early, for fear of folks ending up at the wrong gate, even in the wrong sub-terminal.

These days if logged in as a passenger with your booking ref into the company’s public facing site you do get gate notification, but usually no earlier than STD minus 45..about the same time it goes on the display boards.

US airport websites often show gate info way in advance (sometimes over a day) and then have to change it, but it is still useful. At an airport like LHR the gate may genuinely not be known until the income aircraft is allocated it on short finals.

One problem is that the philosophy of computer systems generally seems to have changed over the years. You used to be able to get a lot of information but now it is all "personalised" you can get it for an individual flight but not an overview. I miss not having an overview - a quick scan often gives an idea of whether there are general ongoing delays. At outstations you could check if the inbound service was on time. (This philosphy is an even bigger problem with timetables, indeed a right pain in the derriere if you want to plan a multi trip itinerary.)

A multiplicity of codeshares has created problems with some websites although that is easily solvable - have a show codeshares or not button.

Flightstats was very good. They now charge for the full service but you can still get data for the day of departure for free.