With so many loyalty and booking classes, it’s not hard to see why American Airlines has nine boarding groups. To prevent passengers from boarding when they should not, gate agents are tasked with checking tickets to confirm group numbers.

Unfortunately, these checks are not always performed, and there are almost always the guaranteed few passengers who try to take advantage of the opportunity by boarding in a higher priority group than what is listed on their ticket.

In my limited experience flying American Airlines, I’ve seen group jumpers embarrassed time and time again, leading me to believe that there was already a digital check in place to identify passengers boarding before their group was called. To my surprise, it was actually the gate agents doing the checks, and not the machine.

American is finally catching up with other airlines, and has started modifying their boarding pass scanners to catch those few special passengers too impatient to wait their turn. I imagine the scanner might chirp differently and blink red to let the gate agent know the passenger has to go back and wait their turn.

The simple change was tested at a handful of airports in October, and is being rolled out to more than 100 U.S. airports in throughout November. In an interview with The Points Guy, Kim Cisek, American’s vice president of customer experience said, “boarding is really important to our customers.

“Our customers want a calm boarding experience, they want it to be seamless, they want to be able to board with their group and not have other customers in front of them.”

During their trials at Albuquerque, Tuscon and Dallas-Ft. Worth, they also noticed less crowds around the gate area once travelers realized how quickly errant passengers could be identified.

In my opinion, American has way too many boarding groups, and should look into consolidation. However, since credit card partnerships do bring in a fair share of money, it’s important for the airline to ensure customers are getting what they paid for, even if it’s making sure others don’t skip ahead of them during boarding.