Airport lounges: how did they get so horribly, competitively decadent?
Source: The Guardian ·
High-end cocktails, nap pods, waffle stations, tapas attendants, sashimi bars and brutalist art. The airlines’ battle to please the 1% is getting increasingly bizarreName: Airport lounge wars.Age: American Airlines opened the first airport lounge in 1939. Continue reading...
From the source
Age: American Airlines opened the first airport lounge in 1939. Appearance: Dripping in caviar and cocktails. Airport lounge wars – is this a TV show where teams of would-be hospitality entrepreneurs compete to design and deliver airport lounge experiences for a demanding celebrity jury? No (but I’d absolutely watch that). It’s the arms race to provide increasingly extravagant lounges to persuade customers to shell out for first-class plane tickets or fancy credit cards that grant access, as reported by the Washington Post. Hang on, my credit card gives me lounge access! You queue up in a dingy corridor and eventually, if a scowling woman in a blazer deems you worthy, you get a picked-over buffet of dried-out ham and mini croissants, plus the chance to fight for an uncomfortable chair, still warm from the previous set of buttocks. Yes, that’s the lounge experience for your kind of low-value riff-raff – people are increasingly complaining about queues and overcrowding; American…