The Airport-Lounge Wars
When you’re waiting for a flight, what’s the difference between out there and in here?
Airport lounges are about who gets in and who does not. There are lounges with hot dogs on rollers, lounges with pedicurists, and lounges with personal butlers. Ease of admission varies accordingly. Most people at an airport don’t visit a lounge. If they did, it would kind of defeat the purpose. But we’re getting there. Last year, Priority Pass, a membership network of mostly low- and mid-tier lounges, saw a thirty-one-per-cent increase in visits. By 2023, amid the post-pandemic travel boom, John F. Kennedy Airport had increased its lounge space in Terminal 4 alone to some seventy thousand square feet—about the size of Bill Gates’s mansion, Xanadu 2.0. Since then, the terminal has added another Xanadu’s worth. There are more than thirty-five hundred airport lounges in the world. Suvarnabhumi Airport, in Bangkok, has thirty-seven—roughly one for every two gates. Kasane, Botswana, a town of about ten thousand people, has an airport smaller than some lounges; it has an airport lounge. Three of the four lounges in Punta Cana’s airport have outdoor pools.
Some people fly just to visit a specific lounge. Others go to great lengths to get in. In 2016, at Changi Airport, in Singapore, a Malaysian businessman named Raejali Buntut missed a flight to Kuala Lumpur. He’d dozed off in the Plaza Premium Lounge. Instead of rebooking, he went to more lounges, hopping from one to the next, a total of thirty-one times. He didn’t leave the airport for eighteen days. He got into the lounges with a Priority Pass—a perk of his Citi credit card—and forged flight tickets. A staffer at one lounge eventually alerted the authorities. She received a special ceremony and a plaque. Buntut received a fraud conviction and was sent to jail, a place definitionally very similar to a lounge, but emotionally very different.
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Recently, I endeavored to visit as many lounges as I could in the span of a week without leaving New York, like Buntut but without the fraud. I have a fondness for free stuff and a willingness, on occasion, to sit around and do nothing. I do not have status—of any kind—but I do have a Priority Pass. Thus I found myself at the HelloSky Lounge, in a busy corner of J.F.K.’s Terminal 4.
Like a D.M.V. with couches, HelloSky had ceiling tiles, almost no natural light, and carpet that will take centuries to decompose. There were cheap Halloween decorations everywhere. Everyone seemed thrilled to be there. I sat down in front of a paper cutout of a witch. Nearby were Matt and Joann Gross, who were waiting for a flight to Memphis. “We’re going on a geriatric cruise down the Mississippi,” Joann explained. They were fans of HelloSky. “It’s really nice!” Joann said. “In here it’s less airporty.”
“It’s not very crowded,” Matt said. “I’ve been in some that are like being on the subway. You might as well sit out there.” He gestured to the concourse.
Kevin James, a history professor at the University of Guelph who has studied airport lounges, called their product offering “an enhanced experience of stasis”—waiting but better. Peter Greenberg, CBS News’ travel editor, who, fifty years ago, bought lifetime lounge passes with six airlines, said, “What they want people to say is ‘Well, it’s better than nothing.’ And that’s usually what they are—slightly better than nothing.” A lounge is the kind of place that puts fruit in your water. One better-than-nothing criterion to judge a lounge is its bathrooms. An Air France lounge in Paris has rest-room suites with padded leather walls and blown-glass chandeliers, like a jewel box for bowel movements. HelloSky had no bathrooms. The water was basic: lemons, cloudy, warm. I ate some mushy cheesecake bites out of a supermarket box labelled “Dianne’s Fine Desserts” and some meatballs (tasty), and ended my experience of stasis.
I’d heard that the Air India lounge had toilets, so I made my way over. The lounge looked like a college cafeteria and smelled of fenugreek. I loaded up a plate at the buffet. The cheesecake bite tasted familiar: Dianne’s. As I nibbled on a soggy samosa, I noticed that the two men next to me weren’t eating at all.
“We’re just waiting to get into the Virgin Clubhouse,” one of them, Ryan, said. Lounge access is governed by a complex array of memberships, airline alliances, and credit-card partnerships, with rules stipulating duration of stay and hours of entry. Sometimes you can pay to enter. (HelloSky charged fifty-nine dollars for three hours.) The Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse is a different lounge at different times of day. “It’s a Priority Pass lounge from 5 A.M. to 1:30,” Ryan said, meaning that you get a bagel, yogurt, porridge. “From two to later, it’s the real clubhouse,” meaning sit-down service: venison burgers, pan-fried salmon, beet salad.
Ryan’s friend Danny explained that the Air India lounge served as a kind of pre-lounge for the Virgin lounge—a place to wait for the place you wait. They were on a Delta layover from Stockholm. Ryan is only twenty but said that he expected to hit a million miles soon. “I can’t count all of the lounges I’ve been to,” he said. “I’ve probably been to all the Delta clubs in Atlanta.” There are nine; some fliers do a club crawl, which involves finishing one drink at each Sky Club during a single layover. “Obviously, I’ve been to a lounge on every continent,” Ryan went on. (He doesn’t count Antarctica, though there is a lounge there, consisting of a complex of igloos on a private airstrip which advises you to “drink your champagne quick before it freezes!”) “One lounge gave me food poisoning, twice,” Ryan told me. “One lounge in China was just a room.” That was in Shangri-La, in the Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. Oddly, he wasn’t a fan of lounges. “In Atlanta, it’s better to go to P. F. Chang’s,” he said.
Ryan was diamond-medallion tier on Delta, but this did not afford him admission to any of the three Delta lounges at J.F.K. “If you’re platinum or diamond medallion on Delta and travelling internationally, you’re allowed into the Virgin Clubhouse but not the Delta Sky Club, unless you’re flying Delta One,” he said. “Delta is very judgy. They make you feel like you did something special to get in, to be worthy.”
The men offered to try to get me into the Virgin lounge. “There’s no guarantees,” Ryan warned. The distracted attendant let all of us in. The lounge gleamed. There were polished wooden floors and a red felt pool table. One couch looked like it was made of red balloons. The water pitcher had slices of orange and lemon and sprigs of mint, spaced evenly around its perimeter, and it was ice-cold. A waitress brought me a duck tostada.
We used to spend a lot more time waiting than we do now. We waited for the mail, for the milkman, for the news, for a ship, for a sign, for the bread to rise, for the tide to ebb, for the cavalry, for good things to come. As people were always waiting for something, dedicating special areas in which to do so would’ve been ludicrous. In the sixteenth century, kings, Popes, Medicis, and other aristocrats began constructing rooms where courtiers would wait. In “The Antechamber: Toward a History of Waiting,” the historian Helmut Puff recounts that, when Mozart was twenty-one and seeking a patron, he complained in letters home about waiting in antechambers across Europe: an hour in Bavaria, another “whole hour” in France, a half hour in a frigid room of a duke and a duchess. When the duchess finally appeared, he told her, “I’d be only too happy to play something but that it was now impossible, as my fingers were numb with cold.” Waiting can make one feel needy, like a baby. The waiter waits because the waitee is too important to.
By contrast, waiters wait in the airport lounge because they are important. The airport lounge was created in 1939 by American Airlines’ C.E.O., C. R. Smith, as a way to build support for commercial aviation. Smith called his first lounge, at LaGuardia, the Admirals Club. (He referred to his planes as the Flagship Fleet.) Membership was private, free, and at the company’s discretion. A manual listed those eligible: generals, congressmen, governors, judges, members of the U.N. Secretariat, “persons listed in Who’s Who.” New “Admirals” were commissioned in faux naval ceremonies. Often, they’d get a writeup in the local paper. Smith would send personal letters about Admiral business. (“Dear Admiral: As you know, we are not permitted to extend membership in the Admiral’s Club to the ladies. . . .”) He’d sign off, “C. R. Smith, Fleet Admiral.”
The lounge itself was homey: low ceilings, lamps, blue carpet (“Flagship Blue”), and red leather armchairs. “It’s the kind of room men enjoy, but in which women will feel at home,” a company brochure claimed. It was staffed by a young woman called the skipper and hidden within the airport; you’d ring a doorbell, then, once inside, play bridge, or maybe send a telegram. At Washington National, Admirals would come on Sundays, without a flight, just to drink.
Other lounges followed: Continental’s Presidents Club, T.W.A.’s Ambassadors Club. Braniff Airways’ president wrote to prospective members that “we would consider it an honor if you would become a member of the Braniff International Council.” Drinks could be more expensive than they were in the concourse. Exclusivity was the appeal. A Pan Am employee-training guide instructed that members of its Clipper Club should be made to feel “VERY V.I.P.” Some very, very V.I.P.s got special tags that read “EXCOR,” meaning that they were deserving of extra courtesy. Within a few decades, there were half a million lounge members. The Times described them as “an arbitrarily created aristocracy of nabobs, moguls, tycoons and big cheeses whom the airlines like to indulge on the chance that they might eventually throw some business their way.” In 1959, the Civil Aeronautics Board, the industry regulator, began an investigation to determine whether American Airlines used undue influence to win a lucrative route between New York and San Francisco. One person involved testified that he’d been made an Admiral.
In 1965, a night-light salesman from Providence, Rhode Island, named Herbert Goldberger was flying on American Airlines with a layover in New York. There were lots of delays. Goldberger wanted a Scotch-on-the-rocks. His seatmate suggested the Admirals Club. He found it, after some searching, behind a door marked with a drawing of a hat that looked like Cap’n Crunch’s. The skipper asked if he was an Admiral. He asked to enlist. She sent him away.
“Frankly, I was humiliated by the assumption that I wasn’t as good as the next person,” Goldberger later recalled. He filed a discrimination complaint with the C.A.B., seeking to open the clubs to the paying public. The board seemed uninterested. Years passed. The airlines fought back. One American Airlines executive asked, “If we let just anybody become an Admiral, why would anybody want to be an Admiral?” Goldberger kept pushing his case. It was a lonely stand. C. R. Smith appeared at a hearing and said that Goldberger would be the end of lounges. Senators got involved. Walter Mondale was briefed with updates. Goldberger received hate mail. His wife and kids were hardly supportive. The case went into its eighth year. Goldberger would not relent.
Goldberger eventually won, and he became a minor cult hero. The Times labelled him “the James Meredith of the private airline clubs.” “I never joined the Young Communist League, never marched on Washington, never even wrote a letter to the editor,” he said. “Now I’m drawing people with problems to me.” But, he promised, “this is my last big cause. I do have another pet peeve—I think people who pay cash in restaurants ought to get a seven-per-cent discount. . . . But I am going to do nothing about it.”
Goldberger could come across as a troll—aggrieved but amused. His daughter, Joy, recently assured me that he was not. “It was the biggest thing in his life,” she said. “I don’t remember my father ever standing up for any other causes, ever.” Something about the lounges inflamed a latent sense of righteousness. Either that or he just wanted in. One of the last times Joy saw her father, he had a layover in Baltimore, where she lived. “He wanted me to meet him. Where?” she asked. “At the Admirals Club.”
Like Venice or the “Mona Lisa,” lounges can become victims of their own appeal. Initially, the lounge glasnost was a letdown. People expected the Elizabeth Taylor movie “The V.I.P.s,” which was set in a Heathrow lounge where white-tuxedoed servers carried trays of champagne and patrons discussed tax shelters. Instead, they got “bad hummus and sweaty pretzels,” Greenberg, the travel editor, said. At least you could get in. The more lounges improved, the more crowded they became—lounge gentrification. It’s not uncommon to see a lounge line snaking through the concourse. Inside, seats are scarce. The difference between out there and in here can be blurry—shoe taker-offers, phone talkers, seat hoggers. There are ninety-minute waits for Delta Sky Clubs, standby lists at Chase Sapphire lounges. Queuers would rather sit on the floor than skip the lounge for a chair at the gate, a desperation that might have something to do with Instagram envy, inequality, or an overabundance of premium-economy professionals with business-class expectations. The reason for the lines is obvious: the airlines started letting more people in.
In 1986, Continental Airlines and Marine Midland Bank rolled out the airline industry’s first co-branded credit card. Co-branded credit cards are the ones that offer perks like free checked bags, reward miles, and lounge access. “Our product was terrible, our reliability was terrible, our service was terrible,” Henry Harteveldt, who worked on Continental’s marketing team at the time, told me. They hoped the cards might sell some seats. They became wildly popular. Harteveldt explained, “Now you sell the airline seats to get people to sign up for credit cards.”
Credit-card deals have become the core of the airline industry. During the pandemic, United’s mileage program, built around its partnership with Chase, was valued at around twenty billion dollars; the rest of the business—the passenger part—was ten billion dollars underwater. Annually, charges on Delta’s American Express cards total about one per cent of the U.S. G.D.P. (“It’s amazing how much money people will spend for a free flight,” Harteveldt observed.) In most years, the programs account for much of the airlines’ profits. This year, Delta’s card will earn the company eight billion dollars. Why do people sign up for the cards? “Lounge access is the No. 1 reason,” a Delta executive recently said, of their Reserve card. Since the airline business is largely a credit-card-loyalty business, and since the credit-card-loyalty business is largely a lounge business, it’s only a minor stretch to think of Delta or United as lounge companies that also fly planes. In Atlanta alone, there are two lounges that together cost more than a hundred million dollars to build.
Lounge purveyors view overcrowding as a grave long-term threat. To address it, Delta recently changed its admission policies, capping the number of annual visits and prioritizing American Express passengers. United has a similar policy with Chase. The airlines are also increasing supply. Emirates’ business-class lounge in Dubai is a hundred thousand square feet, which is significantly larger than J.F.K.’s original terminal. United is building a lounge in Houston that will be fifty thousand square feet. “It’s a little bit larger than a football field,” Aaron McMillan, who runs United’s hospitality programs, told me. The only space they could find big enough to mock up the floor plan was an airplane hangar.
I visited a new United Club at Newark that was styled like a lofted co-working space: skylights, subway mosaics, exposed brick. It had a remarkable view of the Manhattan skyline. The sandwiches were fresh. The water had cucumbers. The club wasn’t at capacity, but there must have been hundreds of people in there—it felt as bustling as the terminal. This one was thirty thousand square feet, about the size of the main concourse at Grand Central and several times bigger than some airports I’ve been to.
The most intense fighting in the “lounge wars,” as the aviation press calls them, is among the credit-card companies. In 2013, American Express opened a stand-alone lounge, for owners of its high-end cards, called the Centurion Lounge. “The narrative was ‘Why would you do that?’ ” Audrey Hendley, the president of American Express Travel, told me. “We’re trying to convey the world-class service and backing of American Express.” Chase soon followed. Each competes to out-fancy the other. The Centurion Lounge at LaGuardia was nice, with refreshing lemon-cucumber water, but a little cramped. If this was once world-class, it is no longer. So, this summer, American Express rolled out a new buffet menu—crab frittata, cornflake-crusted French toast—created by four James Beard Award-winning chefs, including Kwame Onwuachi, the star chef of Tatiana. Onwuachi’s plantain bread pudding, I feel obliged to say, was way better than P. F. Chang’s.
The Chase Sapphire Lounge, next door, offers private lounges within the lounge, starting at twenty-two hundred dollars for three hours. Each is a suite that comes with a PlayStation, a shower, and bathrobes. Dana Pouwels, Chase’s head of airport lounges, showed me around. “Typically, when you arrive at the suite, you would have welcome caviar and champagne,” she said. The suite seemed unnecessary; the rest of the lounge was nice enough. There was an Art Deco bar, custom wallpaper, and carpentry imported from Germany. Everything was JPMorgan blue. Water taps were built into the wall. “We rotate this quarterly to maintain seasonality,” one of Pouwels’s deputies said. “This rotation includes a blackberry-sage spa water.”
There was also a photo booth, a faux fireplace, and a spa. “The Sapphire Reserve customer is an experience maximizer,” Pouwels said. I was booked for a facial.
The technician told me, “Your skin’s kind of sensitive and dry.” She prepared a mask and an infrared treatment, “to help with the collagen.” Afterward, she rubbed cold metal balls around on my face. “This is cooling,” she said. “It’s for puffiness.” My skin was analyzed and graded using A.I. My score: seventy-four out of a hundred. I went to a mirror and rubbed my cheek. “You look nice and shiny!” the technician said. My face felt smooth, cold, and a little wet, like a hard-boiled egg in the fridge.
When I emerged, I received enough compliments that I felt closer to an eighty-four. Pouwels said, “We have principles called the host mentality.” They’re granular enough to cover how to refer to a guest—first name, sir, ma’am, honorific—in different situations. She declined to elaborate. “Our competitors pay attention,” she said.
Everyone at the Capital One Lounge at J.F.K. called me Mr. Zach, which made me feel like a preschool teacher, only wealthier. Capital One was a late but enthusiastic lounge-war combatant. Last year, it opened a lounge at Washington National Airport which included a kitchen custom designed by José Andrés, who oversees the food. One company executive told the Times, “If there was a budget, I was not aware of it.” There’s a little cart, which is wheeled around to deliver cones filled with caviar. In New York, it’s used for a sunset champagne service. There’s also a counter meant to evoke a bodega, stocked with fresh Ess-a-Bagel. I spent a delightful forty-five minutes at the cheesemonger’s bar, where I was served a personalized flight consisting of a Swiss cows’-milk cheese shaved into little bouquets, a deep-orange cheddar, and a black-truffle sheep-milk cheese from Italy, along with sherry and wine, with limoncello to clear my palate. When I was done, I moved to hand my plate back to the cheesemonger. “The cheese attendant will take care of that, Mr. Zach,” the cheesemonger told me. Out of the wall taps flowed regular water. A Capital One travel employee told me that fresh-fruit-infused water can be a pain—everything has to be cleaned constantly and kept at a low temperature, and the fruit clogs up the spigots. “I just want a glass of water,” she said. “We don’t need all that stuff.”
Credit-card lounges are a way to feel like you have status and money, but they do not necessarily require you to have that much of either. (Chase and American Express recently raised their annual fees; you can still break even, but only by carefully coupon-booking the perks.) For those who are actually wealthy, there are even more rarefied options. The Delta One Lounge at J.F.K. has its own check-in area, which looks like the lobby of a luxury hotel. I was met there by a friendly woman named Hiroko, from the premium-services department. After checking me in, she escorted me through T.S.A. “We’re supposed to have our own separate security line,” she said, apologizing. It was closed because of the government shutdown. This cost us approximately sixty seconds.
The private checkpoint, when open, leads directly to the lounge, which is furnished with marble, hardwoods, and burnished metals. Hiroko showed me around: sunroom, business workstations, hand towels in the showers arranged into cute animal shapes. Occasionally, as we walked, a diffuser let out a puff of fog that smelled like clean linen. Near the spa, Hiroko stopped by some spigots and announced, “The magic juice wall.” She poured me her favorite, kale-cucumber-celery-fennel-lemon juice. I downed two cups.
The space wasn’t vastly different from the Polaris lounge—United’s top-tier offering—at Newark. Delta had the spa; United had little sleeper suites, with a ceiling lit up like the night sky. Neither is open to credit-card holders or day-pass buyers. These are only for those with long-haul business-class tickets, which typically go for several thousand dollars.
The fancier the lounge, the less the lounge goer has to interact with the actual airport. “We have Porsches,” Hiroko told me, by the windows. “You see them down below?” She led me to the tarmac, where there was a fleet of six cars. For an extra five hundred and fifty dollars, Delta will drive you straight to the plane and pick you up on the other end.
Hiroko booked me at the lounge’s restaurant, a Danny Meyer venture. I had trouble deciding what to eat. I eventually ordered the mussels with charred pineapple as an appetizer, and an entrée of lamb chops. “Are you sure you don’t want to order two?” my waiter, Darren, asked. I added risotto. “No surf and turf? Maybe the swordfish?” I ordered the swordfish. It was 11:30 A.M. Everyone around me was drinking red wine.
I’d made a miscalculation and accidentally booked a massage at the same time I was supposed to be getting my dessert. So Darren held my soufflé and pretzel brownie while an attendant escorted me to the spa. Around me, passengers wore compression pants that looked like astronaut suits, to drain the fluid out of their travel-bloated legs. My treatment was a chair massage. It was a little disappointing. Even this lounge was filling up, making it hard to fully relax, and I couldn’t help but think of Thai Airways’ first-class lounge in Bangkok, whose free one-hour massages are full body—the real deal.
The thing about lounging is that it’s impossible to lounge without worrying that someone, somewhere, is lounging better. My swordfish was, frankly, perfect, but would it have been even more perfect in Frankfurt, where Lufthansa has an entire first-class terminal whose restaurant has items from all of the cities in its route system flown in fresh daily? Had I missed out on the best lounge without even knowing it? The Virgin Clubhouse at Heathrow used to have a hydrotherapy, bath-steam, room-tanning, booth-ski simulator, and a four-hole putting green with a sand trap.
The best lounges generally are abroad, often in destinations with a long history of aristocracy. Air France’s first-class lounge in Paris, with the jewel-box bathrooms, offers fifteen-year-old Veuve Clicquot, twelve different brands of bottled water, and an Alain Ducasse restaurant serving foie gras and truffles. According to one visitor, “The difference between this meal and one in a Polaris-lounge restaurant is like the difference between that same Polaris-lounge meal and the food you’d get at an Ambassadors lounge.” You can pay for your own hotel-style suite with a bed, an outdoor patio, and a dedicated butler. They’re militant about entry rules. If you’re merely business class and want to partake, you have to pay nine hundred and ninety euros, and you’re allowed to do that only if you’ve flown first class sometime in the past year. The Al Safwa First Lounge, in Doha (private duty-free shop, screening room, Keith Haring on the wall, architecture “more comparable to a cathedral, mosque, mausoleum, or state monument than anything else,” as one visitor described it), is more lenient. You can even bring your nanny. She’ll go in the nanny room, a windowless white space with a few seats and high chairs.
In the U.S., the best you can do is P.S., short for “private suite,” which houses its lounges in bespoke buildings far away from the terminal so that you never even have to deal with the airport at all. (Their tarmac cars are BMWs.) “It’s meant to feel like you’ve been invited into a good friend’s home,” Jean Liu, who is designing a P.S. lounge in Dallas, told me. There’s art and curated bookshelves, along with Michelin-rated chefs and a spa. Liu was prioritizing vintage pieces. “So it feels a little more storied, not everything is new, new, new,” she said. “We are also really fortunate to work with Sandra Jordan. She was the pioneer in luxury alpaca fabrics. She is actually giving us all of the fabrics for the window treatments.” You still have to go through T.S.A. and customs, but they feel more like the help you’ve invited into your home. “For example, when you approach C.B.P., the podium is actually a custom piece of furniture that we’re designing with them,” Liu said. Each departure and arrival with P. S. costs thirteen hundred dollars. (For an extra sixteen hundred and fifty dollars per person, a car will pick you up directly from the plane and drop you off at your final destination.) “I don’t know where you live,” Liu told me, “but you really should try it.”