"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."
"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."
Airport lounges function as gated spaces that signal privilege through selective admission. Amenities range from basic food offerings to luxury services such as pedicures, personal butlers, and outdoor pools. Membership networks like Priority Pass have driven substantial increases in lounge visitation. Major airports have dramatically expanded lounge square footage, and thousands of lounges now exist globally, including in small towns. Some travelers choose flights specifically to access particular lounges, and some have exploited memberships and forged documents to remain in or hop between lounges for extended periods.
Read at The New Yorker
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