The Airport-Lounge Wars

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.”

“Behold—the future. We have flying cars and global peace, we’re free from illness, and we have working printers, microwaves that cook things in the center, and buildings shaped like eggs and hamburgers.”

Cartoon by Chris Gural

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.”