Lounge Lizard

Not too long ago, I treated myself to a luxe experience that I would rather not enjoy again. I was flying overnight, overseas out of Dulles International Airport in the hinterlands of the Washington, D.C., suburbs. It was the last day of the federal government’s forty-three-day shutdown, and I expected more than my usual allotment of airport frustration. So, I, ever the conscientious traveler, arrived three hours early, armed with a novel, a big bag of peanuts, and—oh what a mistake! The place was deserted. Really, no one was there. After a perfunctory dressing down in the security line, where a T.S.A. flunky attempted to buy my grandfather’s Hamilton off my wrist, I zoomed down to the empty international terminal on a tram carrying nothing but me and my two bags.

Where had all the people gone? I soon found out. For I, like so many other Americans suckered into signing up for airline credit cards in the last ten years, have a subscription to Priority Pass, a service that gives me access to more than eighteen hundred airport lounges in six hundred cities across nearly one hundred fifty countries. Priority Pass is sold as the ultimate traveler’s perk—Beat the crowds! Feast on chef-prepared meals! Wash it down with drinks on the house!—but the reality is rarely so swank. I walked over to the Turkish Airlines lounge near my gate and presented my membership card to the overtired attendant sitting desk. She glared at me and pointed to a handwritten sign taped on the door: PRIORITY PASS: 30 MIN WAIT. I peered around the corner of the reception area into the lounge’s ill-lit main room. It was packed, crowded with travelers of all ages sipping espresso as they huddled protectively around their luggage. Everyone in the airport had to have been in there. I nodded with understanding. The attendant took my name and told me that I would receive a text when it was my turn.

Fine by me. I hauled my bags to a row of seats at the gate directly across from the lounge and plopped down to read. The Leopard held my attention for some time, but after half an hour I began to tire of Prince Fabrizio’s studied lethargy and of his nephew Tancredi’s boisterous cynicism. I looked down at my phone. No text. Another fifteen minutes passed. Still nothing. Then another ten. I was just about to take my name off the wait list when my phone buzzed. My turn! My heart jumped. It was only a momentary animal impulse, but I felt like Charlie winning his golden ticket to the chocolate factory. I dragged my bags through Turkish Airlines’ sliding glass doors and beamed at the attendant. I had arrived.

Of course, I was just the latest in a long line of arrivals. The lounge was as packed as before, and once inside the main room, I felt stifled. The air was perfumed with fine Parisian scents, but the place still stank of stale sweat and unbrushed teeth. I groped my way through the dim light to the buffet, where I met a gooey mess of chicken and rice laid out underneath heat lamps, set next to a limp salad bar that would not have been out of place at Chuck E. Cheese. Everything was labeled in Turkish with comically overwrought English translations. I filled up a glass from a carafe tagged “detox water a la cucumber and mint” and made my way toward the desserts, mocha brownies stranded on a platter without even the courtesy of serving tongs. An older German next to me clenched his fists and cursed this indignity. A group of Arabs, soon to board a red-eye to Doha, laughed at his anguish and grabbed the brownies by the handful. Behind them, two robotic trash cans roamed the room, bumping into tables and upsetting their patrons. On the other end of the lounge, a gaggle of Chinese businessmen spread themselves out along the length of the bar, lining up empty beer glasses, cackling, and hurling abuse at the bumbling trash cans.

I couldn’t find a chair, so I sat on a radiator, between two Turks. One stared stoically into an undrunk Americano; the other fell deep into an endless Instagram scroll. I drank a coffee, then a tea, then a water, and finally, feeling a little sicker than I did upon entry, left the lounge and sought the relatively fresh air of the terminal. My flight boarded shortly after.

The Turkish Airlines lounge at Dulles is considered one of the nine “best Priority Pass lounges in the U.S.” by The Points Guy, a popular website dedicated to helping frequent flyers squeeze the most out of their airline credit card memberships. Other top lounges include the Air France Lounge at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, the Lufthansa Business Lounge in Detroit, and The Club in Orlando. They are all basically the same. Each one offers a buffet, beer, wine, cocktails, and a panoply of other dubious amenities prominently listed on the Priority Pass app, including “televisions,” “Wi-fi,” and “air conditioning.” And, in recent years, as lounge access has become a standard line item in any airline’s credit card package, these places and others like them have become dirty, noisy, overcrowded—a reduplication of the main terminal’s general misery, charged at a premium.

Lounge access is just one star in a giant constellation. These days credit card programs make up more of the airline business than flying planes ever could. The shift began in the late 1970s, when Congress deregulated commercial air travel. At that time, the newly competitive airlines instituted loyalty programs, based on miles accrued. It didn’t take long for the major players to realize that they could make more money if they swapped “miles” for the more nebulous “points” system, in which customers rack up more potential for rewards as they spend more money. Airlines, as Ganesh Sitaraman observes in Why Flying Is Miserable: And How to Fix It, are now in the position of the Federal Reserve: They issue the points, they set their value, and they determine for what use they can be spent as legal tender. The points have become hugely profitable ever since Delta, American, and United partnered with the likes of Chase, American Express, and Visa. The scheme plays out like an entirely separate monetary system: The airlines mint their chits for almost nothing. They sell them to banks for something like double their value. The banks, in turn, sell the promise of rewards back to consumers in the form of co-branded cards, which, as anyone who has one knows, often carry ruinously high annual fees.

The full extent of the credit card scheme’s predominance over the industry did not become apparent until the recent pandemic, when commercial flight slowed down significantly. At that time, the major airlines used their loyalty programs as collateral in their applications for the loans that would save them from bankruptcy. A contemporary investigation by the Financial Times found that lenders valued the loyalty programs far in excess of the airlines themselves. United Airlines, for example, was valued at just over ten billion dollars, while MileagePlus, its points program operated in partnership with Chase, clocked in at just under twenty-two billion. The implication, the pink paper wryly noted, was that “investors value the business of flying passengers at less than zero.”

In the years since the pandemic, airlines and credit card companies have only become more tightly intertwined. In 2023, Delta’s C.E.O. Ed Bastian announced that American consumers annually charge about one percent of the gross domestic product—nearly two hundred seventy billion dollars—to Delta’s Amex cards. That same year, the company reported that it had received about seven billion dollars in revenue from its partnership with Amex. American Airlines and United also reported more than three billion dollars in revenue from their own card programs, making these partnerships their single most important component for profitability.

And lounges play a significant role in tying the knot. Since at least 2016, when Chase first introduced Priority Pass into its travel card packages, the lounge has become the ultimate traveler’s prestige marker. Since then, credit card companies have realized that they do not need to rely on airlines to provide the experience. In the last few years alone, Amex, Chase, and Visa have all opened their own airport lounges to cash in on rising consumer demand for luxury hangouts. The race for the most alluring lounge has become fiercely competitive: “We wake up every day to think about how we can persuade a group of consumers to agree to take a platinum card and pay us a $695 annual fee,” Howard Grosfield, Amex’s president of U.S. consumer services, admitted last year. The program has been hugely successful, and the fee has gone up.

The feeding frenzy has of course attracted congressional attention, but the push for tighter regulation is unlikely to go anywhere fast. The Credit Card Competition Act has been introduced every year since 2022 without effect. The bill’s aim is to cap the fees that credit card companies can charge on the merchants who accept them. Doing so would lower the companies’ revenues and as a result reduce the amount they could pay for the airline points. Congress would effectively become the arbiter of the points’ value, and the whole scheme would fall apart. The legislation, United’s C.E.O. Scott Kirby said upon its introduction, “would kill rewards programs. They would not exist anymore.” Neither airlines nor credit card companies—nor, for that matter, consumers, are willing to let that pass.

The reasons for mass buy-in are obvious. As it stands, if you don’t take advantage of the system, it takes advantage of you. Since credit card companies demand a cut of every commercial transaction, merchants slightly increase their prices to offset the fees they must pay. These price increases are passed on to the consumer—unless your card accrues points. In that case, the points your card collects (or the add-on benefits, such as lounge access, which you receive via your card membership) are more or less your compensation for participation. The trade-off isn’t exact, but it’s close enough. And anyway, if you don’t have a credit card that collects points, then you are getting taken for a ride. The higher prices you pay for goods and services help subsidize the points, the benefits, and all the other goodies of those whose cards do. They are the happy people in the credit card commercials; you are the loser watching them.

I hardly need to rehearse these facts for many of my readers. Everyone knows that the credit card racket is, at some level, a predatory line of work. Somewhere along the way someone is taking advantage of you. It is not fair, but nothing is fair. I think this taken-for-granted knowledge is in large part to blame for the bestial behavior in airport lounges. These places are hunting preserves, and simply by entering one you activate your killer instincts. You have sunk so much into the card, the loyalty program, the expectations of preferred treatment—better take it for all it’s worth. Load up on food and booze, stuff your pockets with hot chocolate and tea packets, take a hot shower, book a massage. Then, when you’re done, peer out of the windows at all those poor dumb people hurrying through the terminal outside.

I wish I could say I was exaggerating, but this picture isn’t far from the truth. I have visited nearly two dozen airport lounges in North America and Europe this past year, and everywhere it is much the same. Just this past summer I was killing time in Washington, D.C.’s Amex lounge with my daughter. We were having a pleasant conversation with a traveling businessman. Suddenly his phone buzzed. He looked down. His flight was boarding. Panic! His eyes, previously placid, dilated. He bolted the beer he had been nursing. He quickly ordered another. Then he looked around in wild fury, desperate for something to grab on his way out. His eyes lit on a plate of chocolate chip cookies by the bar. He stuffed his blazer pockets full and dashed out the door. “And does he know that ten cookies is too many?” my daughter nearly shouted as he left. I’m sure he did know. But in the lounge, too many is not even enough.