Secrets of Airport Lounges

Foreign.

And welcome to the Fromer Travel Show.

I'm your host, Pauline Fromer.

I recently read an article in the New Yorker that, and this isn't hyperbole, it totally blew my mind.

I have been covering airlines, airports, travel for most of my adult life.

And it revealed that there's a strata of travel that I really did not know even existed.

The article is called Lounge wars, and I have its author, Zach Helfand, here on the line.

Hey, Zach, thank you so much for appearing on the Farmer Travel Show.

Thanks for having me on.

So let's start at the beginning.

In terms of the history of, of airport lounges, why were they created?

Why do we have these things?

Airport lounges were created as like, I would say, half reward for extremely loyal airline customers and half kind of like borderline low level corruption.

They were created by American Airlines CEO C.R.

smith in the late 30s.

He's one of these big Seminole airline industry figures.

And he created something called the admirals Club at LaGuardia Airport, what's now known as LaGuardia Airport.

And they would give Admiral Club membership.

They would induct you as an admiral if you were a frequent flyer, but also if you were someone who was on the airline regulator boards or if you were a governor or you or someone else who might be able to help build the aviation industry and you couldn't buy your way in.

There were no mileage regulations that got you in.

It was just if they invited you to be an admiral, you were in and you would get all the perks that came along with that.

That concept spread to other airlines and they were all closed.

You couldn't get your way in the other ones either.

Until the mid-60s.

A man named Herbert Goldberger.

Yeah, I loved his story.

He was one of my favorite characters to encounter when I was researching this.

And he was a frequent flyer.

He was a salesman.

He sold things like nightlights, and he would travel the country to sales conferences and things like that.

And he had this terrible travel experience with a lot of delays.

And he was going through JFK and he really just wanted to Scotch on the rocks.

And the guy he was sitting next to on the airplane said, why don't you go to the Admirals Club?

And so he went to the Admiral's Club, which were hidden at the time because they didn't want people to know about it.

It's kind of like a hidden clubhouse.

He found it, it had a little admiral's hat on the, on the door.

And he asked to be let in.

And they said, sorry, this only, members only.

And he said, how do I join?

And they said, you can't, and you have to be invited.

And so he sued.

He spent eight years embroiled in illegal action to.

To open up the airlines to everyone.

And ultimately he won.

And I thought he was doing this kind of as like, you know, a trolley kind of thing.

And I ended up talking to his daughter, who recalls that this was like the most important thing in his life.

Like, he wanted to integrate, in a certain sense, the airline lounge.

I love the fact that she said he never had any other cause in life.

This was.

This really took over his whole psyche, and he really wanted to make this open to everyone.

And so his.

His family wasn't really down for the whole fight for eight years.

They were like, why are you doing this?

But he was like, this.

This is what I really care about.

Yeah, crazy.

But he accomplished something, I guess.

They had to create rules for these clubs, right?

So what happened is they had to allow access.

So that meant either they could give access with.

With certain rules if you, you know, were a certain level of frequent flyer, or you had some sort of credit card access, ultimately that came later.

And also you could buy your way in.

And so what that did is kind of democratize airline lounge.

And in the early days of that, I think people were expecting this really exclusive, really gorgeous, beautiful space.

And it really wasn't like that, at least in the beginning.

It was just a kind of a little clubhouse where you could get away.

And because people were paying for it, they wanted more.

And so that's kind of led to the escalation of the airline lounge experience.

The aviation press likes to call the airline lounge wars.

You know, the credit card companies and the airlines are trying to outdo each other and give more and more luxurious experience.

And that really stems from the fact that people are paying for it in some way, either because they are literally paying into it or because they're paying for it for their credit cards or because they're paying for it because they're buying a very expensive business class seat or something like that.

And really, airline lounges have become one of the core parts of an airline's business at this point.

Sure.

Well, and let's unpack what the airline's business is.

You'd think it was flying people here and there, but no.

Right now, airline credit cards are probably more important to the bottom line than economy class tickets.

I won't say all tickets, but probably economy class.

So how does lounges play into that whole mishigas?

So this is what really surprised me is, is I learned that the, the credit card partnerships.

So Delta has a partnership with American Express, for example, United has a partnership with Chase where they're selling these co branded credit cards that we all know.

You could buy the Chase Explorer card or the United Explorer card.

Yeah, right, right.

That has become a bigger and bigger part of the business to the point where by most measures these credit card partnerships are more valuable than the, the flying of the airplanes itself.

During COVID and of course during COVID the airlines took a big hit and the way they, they stayed afloat was by taking loans using the credit card partnerships as collateral.

So there was a point at which these credit card partnerships were for the big airlines like United or like Delta, were worth something like $20 billion.

And the rest of the business was like, you know, in the red underwater by like $10 billion.

And the only thing keeping the airline business afloat were these partnerships.

Most of the profit at this point comes from the credit card partnerships themselves, those programs.

Of course, you know, some of that is accounting.

You know, they, they, they are, are basically selling their own seats to their credit card partnerships or giving them and they, they sell it.

But, but the reason they're so valuable is because credit card companies love them.

They get lots and lots of data, they get loyal customers.

And, and the number one reason a lot of people sign up for these co branded credit card partnerships with, with the airlines is because of lounge access.

That's really one of the top draw or one of the top draws for almost everyone who gets these.

So that's why the lounges have become more and more important and more and more kind of crazily luxurious in some cases is because it really is the core of the airline business.

Core of the airline business.

But now there are two types of lounges.

There are ones that are done by the airlines and then there are ones that are just for credit cards.

Right, that's right.

There, there are certain lounges like the Chase Sapphire lounge or the American Express Centurion lounge or the Capital One lounges that, that are, if you have those certain type of credit card of theirs, you have access at least, you know, a certain amount of access.

They're trying to gate it now because they've gotten so crowded.

Yeah.

And, and those tend to be very nice, but sometimes hard to get in or crowded or there's lines.

There's also this is, this is usually my lounge experience.

There's something called Priority Pass, which you get a Priority Pass membership with a lot of credit Cards.

So I have one.

Yeah.

And, and, and really, is it any, a lot of these, are they any better than being out in the concourse in some cases?

No.

Yeah, my husband thinks so.

You know.

Yeah, that's, that's kind of what I realized through the course of doing this is, is I really liked being in the lounges, and I think I liked being the lounges because it kind of inflated, you know, it tickled my ego a little bit.

Like I get to be somewhere special and, and, and, and really, when you think about it, a lot of the concourses, you know, especially the new airports, are pretty nice.

LaGuardia, which is near me, I used to be horrible, and now it's quite nice.

And it's a very pleasant experience to just sit out by the gate and watch the planes take off or sit by the water fountain that they have there and watch the water show.

But it, it, it feels nice.

It kind of inflates your sense of importance if you are somewhere where not everyone can get in.

Right.

And let's get back to the beginning of your article.

You decided to try and visit every single airport lounge in the New York City area.

And so that got you into the, you know, the lounges for the hoi polloi, you know, places like where I go, where, you know, it's over as crowded or if not more so than the terminal, but it also got you into some real palaces.

I was astonished by the level of luxury that exists at some of these lounges.

Can you give some examples from the New York area?

And then we'll talk about the fact that the US is well behind Asia and Europe in terms of the luxury over the top crap that are given to the 1% abroad.

I was really surprised too, because my experience had been, you know, I'm hoi pollo, so, so that was my experience.

I think there's kind of three tiers and then maybe kind of like a fourth tier emerging on the very top.

There's, there's kind of the hoi polloi lounges, as we're calling it.

That's, that's kind of the first tier.

There's.

The second tier is like the United regular lounges or the Delta Sky Club, those kinds of things.

And kind of maybe in between the second and third tier are those credit card lounges, the Chase Centurion, the American Express, Centurion, Chase Sapphire, things like that.

And then the third tier is kind of what are this new emerging business class lounge.

So those are things like United has the Polaris lounge, Delta has its Own Delta One lounges.

So the Delta One lounge that I went to at jfk, first of all, is enormous.

Second of all, you can, you can't pay to get in there.

You have to buy a business class ticket.

No status, no credit card partnerships.

You have to just pay a lot of money for a long haul business class flight.

So it's a little bit more exclusive.

It has its own sit down restaurant that's completely free.

It's run by Danny Meyer, the restaurateur behind Shake Shack and Emerson Tavern and all that.

And it's very good.

And I sat down there and, and you just, just order anything off the menu.

It's three free three course meal.

And the waiter was just encouraging me, like, you know, I couldn't decide between a couple appetizers and a couple entrees or desserts.

And he said, why don't you just get both?

So I really had a six course meal.

I love that.

Yeah, there's, there's massages, there's free showers.

They'll steam your clothes for you.

You could pay a little bit extra.

And they will drive you from the lounge in a Porsche to, to your airport to your airplane and you just board straight from the tarmac.

And also it has its own security entrance.

So really like you don't really have to interact with the airport at all, which is kind of part of the, the appeal.

Yeah, see, yeah, that really, that was to me the ultimate luxury not having to go through tsa.

And as an American citizen, I gotta wonder why is our government doing that?

I think that kind of defeats the purpose of having security in a certain way.

If certain people are getting different security.

I don't know.

I mean, I think from the government standpoint, they are getting paid more.

They're getting paid more.

So the airlines, so Delta will pay to, to provide, to basically pay to provide the salaries for the TSA employees.

I'm not sure if they're also providing something on top of that.

They might be.

So the government might be getting a little bit back.

So the security is the same and they don't really have to devote more monetary resources to it because the airline is paying for it.

So that's why the government is okay with it.

But it is.

I mean, I became interested in this idea to write about because I was interested in waiting.

You know, we used to wait for things all the time and, and we don't really wait for things anymore.

You know, we have same day shipping and, and skip the line passes and you know, when the subway train is going to come because you have the app now and, and there's really one of the few places where we still have to wait is at the airport.

And it used to be that waiting was something that you didn't want to do and somehow the airlines have found a way to turn it into like a commodity.

Like, it's nice and there are all these things that you wouldn't think that you actually wanted.

Like, I don't really need a massage or I got a facial at the Chase Sapphire Lounge.

I wouldn't have sought out the facial that day, you know, in my normal everyday life.

But for some reason when you are waiting and are given this perk, it feels like it's.

You're getting something on top of that or you're getting away with something or you're turning this experience into like a bonus.

Somehow waiting itself becomes a luxury.

It's not something that you just do at the DMV anymore.

It's something that can become this great pleasure because you have this in between period of time that is not part of our daily lives anymore.

It was very pleasant to spend an afternoon at the Delta One lounge.

I did some work there and there were little work, you know, phone booths.

These are kind of luxury phone booths where you could do video calls and they have nice lighting and it's soundproof.

And occasionally someone would knock on the door and you know, they'd have a canape and they said, you want a shrimp dumpling while you work?

Yeah, it's, it's, it turns something like the drudgery of waiting into something that you're made to feel like you are a person of importance or someone who, who is, who matters.

You can use it as a hotel.

There are sleep pods in some of these places.

My daughter is doing a malarial study in Ghana and she had to fly through Dubai and she had a nine hour layover there from 11 at night until the morning.

And so she decided to try and get a sleep Pod.

It was $1, which is more expensive than many hotels.

In these lounges you can actually do that.

Right?

You can shower, you can sleep.

You can do a lot of hotel type things as well.

Right.

Most of the luxury lounges have showers and some of them in the US have like sleep pod areas.

So the Polaris Lounge at Newark that I went to has this very kind of spa like area.

I think it's maybe attached to their spa or their shower area, which they also have in the lounge.

And it's kind of the very dark, dark blues and the Ceiling is made to look like the night sky.

So they have like little light up stars in the sky.

Wow.

And they have kind of these, these lounge seats that lay, that, you know, kind of lay flat and you can.

And they have sleep masks for you and it's just a relaxing place to nap.

Internationally, there are hotel spaces within some of the really, really high end lounges where you just get a full hotel suite with a shower and with a nice bed.

One of them at, at De Gaulle in, in Paris, the one of Air France's really high, high, high end first class lounges.

You could get a full hotel room with an outdoor balcony and also a butler, like a personal butler.

And it's all within the lounge.

And also in Paris, there's champagne service at sunset and little cones of caviar.

And do you remember who the chef is on the restaurant there?

It was kind of mind blowing.

I want to say it was Alain Ducasse.

It was one of the really high end.

I'm like 80% sure it was him.

It was one of the really, really high end French chefs.

And the menus are mind blowing.

You know, the champagne is, is, is not just, you know, $40 champagne they picked up at the, at the liquor store.

This is like, you know, very, very nice champagne.

The food is, is like high end Paris food.

And one of the amusing things for me is, is everyone has tried to make every type of experience at the lounge elevated or make you feel like you're special.

So looking at the different water offerings, like people are putting different fruit in the waters or trying to do things with water.

In Paris, I think there were at least 12 different kinds of bottled water.

So if Perrier was not good enough for you, you could get kind of the like boutique bottled water from Cyprus with certain minerals in it.

It's just kind of whatever needs you might want, they want to cater to.

That's so funny.

I once went to a very high end sushi restaurant and I asked where the bathroom was.

The woman walked me to the bathroom, came in, turned on the light, turned on the Japanese toilet.

So it was nice and warm and then said, enjoy.

I thought, okay, Paris.

This Air France lounge had its, like, they were individual bathrooms that were, they were cylindrical with padded leather walls and chandeliers in the.

It was like little jewel boxes in this lounge.

So this begs the question, why even travel?

Why not just go to the airport lounge?

I hope you'll, you'll finish up by telling us the story of the Malaysian businessman who tried to do just that.

That was Hilarious.

Well, I modeled my experience on this Malaysian businessman because I didn't travel anywhere.

I just went to.

I went to Newark, I went to LaGuardia, I went to JFK.

Occasionally I would.

I would need to buy a flight to get access to certain lounges and then I could just cancel it once I got in.

But this businessman, his name was Ryjali Buntut, and I think he had just lost his job or something along those lines.

And he had a flight out of.

Out of Singapore's airport, I want to say.

And he missed his flight.

I'm not sure.

Either by choice or he just ended up missing the flight for some other reason.

I think you said in the article he fell asleep and missed the flight.

That's what it was.

He fell asleep.

Because aren't they supposed to come and tell you?

I mean, isn't that part of the point of the lot?

Some lounges, this was a priority pass lounge.

It was a nice one.

It was international.

In Singapore, this is a really nice airport.

But at this type of lounge, usually not.

Usually you need to be the really high end where they're welcoming you by name and they have lots of attendance.

So he fell asleep and he missed his flight.

And he.

Instead of booking a new flight or just leaving the airport and going to a hotel or carrying on with his life, he ended up staying in the airport for, I think almost a month.

And he just.

Singapore is a huge airport.

It's a very nice luxury airport.

And he just hopped from one airport lounge to the next.

He would get his free food, he would be able to shower or, you know, he didn't go to sleep.

And he forged boarding passes because usually you need a boarding pass to get in.

And so he went from one to the other until finally he was discovered he had been to one lounge too many times.

But the thing is with airport lounges, the airports now have so many lounges that you can stay for almost a month and avoid detection, especially at a big airport.

And finally, he had been to one too many times in too close succession.

And one of the attendants there contacted the authorities and she was given a commendation.

And he was sent to jail.

Yeah, yeah.

Which you say is kind of like another lounge type space for waiting, but with a very different mindset to it all.

Yeah, definitionally it's kind of the same.

It's a place where you are waiting for some transit somewhere, hopefully to freedom if you're in jail and.

And you are given food and water and the basic necessities.

But emotionally, of course, probably Much better than the airport lounge.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, it is a fascinating article, as are most in the New Yorker, my favorite magazine.

So congratulations on that piece and on your many others.

And thank you so much for appearing on the Fromer Travel Show.

Thank you very much.

It was a delight.

And that's it for this week's show.

I thank you so much for listening.

If you like what you hear, please give us a nice review.

And to those who are traveling, may I wish you a hearty bon voyage.

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Oh, it's been so long and I cannot help but wonder Are you ever coming home?

I like you with your sour candy in the boat house on the lake But I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate the way it tastes.

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When I see you with your sour candy don't want it any other way oh I just hate, I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate the way it tastes.