Let’s talk about airport lounges in 2026. Things like:
Capital One changing its Venture X policy so that cardholders can no longer bring guests to Capital One or Priority Pass lounges for free.
Chase capping free guests on its Ritz-Carlton card at two per visit; additional guests now pay $27 each.
Delta Air Lines imposing annual visit caps on Sky Club access for Amex Reserve cardholders, and United Airlines removing Star Alliance lounge access entirely for cardholders spending under $50,000 a year.
Shorter version: Lounges grew so crowded that the credit card companies that spent years using them as a selling point are now quietly taking them back.
I’ll admit that I follow this stuff more as an observer than an affected party. Frankly, my business travel schedule cratered during the pandemic and never really recovered.
As a result, a day or two at the gate with everyone else isn’t a big deal to me.
Also, I like to joke that I have perfectly comfortable chairs at home, and a bar that goes largely untouched. Spending effort to try to recreate that experience in airports has never felt like much of a win.
But I know I’m in the minority on this. Business travelers—the people flying 50, 80, 100 times a year—care about lounges deeply. The airlines have always known it.
I got curious about where this all came from in the first place. It turns out, the road leads back to American Airlines—twice.
We can probably start in 1939. New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia faced criticism for maintaining large, well-equipped offices at his newly opened airport. His solution was to offer to rent the space out.
American Airlines accepted on the spot, and the world’s first airport lounge was born. It started with just nine members, each personally designated an “Admiral” of the American Airlines fleet by chairman C.R. Smith.
There were no membership fees, and people couldn’t apply. American Airlines invited you, or it didn’t.
The theme was nautical throughout: Receptionists were called skippers, bar staff were stewards.
Drinks were free, but when American opened its second lounge near Washington, D.C., Virginia’s dry county laws prohibited selling alcohol.
So, members stored their own bottles on-site. At one point, the club reportedly held over 9,000 bottles, some labeled with the names of influential politicians.
Other airlines followed in the 1940s and 1950s. Pan Am built its Clipper Club. TWA had its Ambassadors Club. Delta had the Flying Colonels program, and United had its 100,000 Mile Club.
By the mid-1960s, virtually every major carrier had one. They lost money, but airlines kept them going anyway. Such was the price of keeping business travelers—then, as now, the most valuable passengers an airline had.
In 1967, after nearly three decades of invitation-only membership, American Airlines made the bold decision to open the Admirals Club to anyone willing to pay $25 a year, or $250 for a lifetime. Other airlines followed again, and the era of the purchasable lounge was underway.
Then American launched another first: AAdvantage, the first major frequent flyer program, on May 1, 1981. Other airlines followed, and lounge access became a natural perk of elite status within those programs. Fly enough, and the lounge came with it.
Credit card companies figured out that lounge access was something people would pay annual fees to get. Eventually, the sheer number of people who had bought in and wanted to use airport lounges skyrocketed.
The lounge industry is projected to hit $16 billion by 2030, which brings us back to where we started: overcrowding, guest caps, access restrictions, and credit card companies recalibrating perks they oversold.
As someone who sometimes writes about airlines, the entire history feels like a never-ending struggle of a commodity industry trying to do anything it can to convince people it’s not selling a commodity.
Lounges were always partly about comfort, but they were mostly about differentiation—a reason to choose one carrier over another when everything else looked identical.
In this case, it all goes back to something that started with nine invited “admirals” who could put their feet up in New York and store their personal whiskey in a club in Virginia.
Other things worth knowing …
NY Post: The USMNT’s loss to Belgium in the World Cup delivered the biggest soccer audience in American television history: 30 million viewers, Fox Sports announced Tuesday. The USMNT fell 4-1 in a loss that looked even worse than the scoreboard suggested. The USMNT has not reached the quarterfinals since 2002, falling in the Round of 16 in each of its last four knockout-stage trips.
Fox News: Embattled U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner was hit with a second explosive allegation of sexual impropriety only about 24 hours after he was accused of rape — all while a major campaign decision deadline looms. “He would pull condoms off,” his ex-girlfriend Lyndsey Fifield told The Washington Post. “He would do it in a sneaky way. He wouldn’t tell me.” Platner must withdraw from the race by 5:00 p.m. on next Monday, July 13, if another Democratic candidate, who would be chosen by the party, is to replace him before the November general election.
NYT: Mayor Zohran Mamdani said a high-profile housing project under construction near Grand Central Terminal, and at risk of collapse, was still unstable Tuesday afternoon and warned New Yorkers to avoid the area. The building conversion is part of a broader effort to repurpose Midtown’s empty office buildings to help fix the city’s housing shortage, and turn the area from a work district to a vibrant neighborhood.
The Guardian: Ninety-five percent of Americans believe the U.S. is suffering an affordability crisis, as many report trouble with the rising cost of groceries and gas, according to a new poll. Despite stable employment and record-high stock markets, more Americans believe the overall economy is getting worse (57%) than in February (46%), before the war in the Middle East.
WaPo: An ICE officer fatally shot a Mexican man in Houston during a traffic stop — the first deadly shooting by federal immigration officers since Renée Good and Alex Pretti were killed in Minneapolis in January.
AP: The U.S. military attacked Iran early Wednesday after saying Tehran struck three ships in the Strait of Hormuz, also revoking Iran’s ability to openly sell crude oil on the world market. Iran immediately warned Washington it would “take whatever measures it deems necessary,” raising the risk that the interim agreement halting the war could break down.
CNN: Copenhagen has taken the No. 1 spot on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual most livable cities list for the second year running. The top U.S. city is Honolulu, at 25th overall; Vancouver came in 9th.
Thanks for reading. Photo by Jubert Alcoriza on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments.
I am pretty sure that if you dissected American Airlines income statements from 1982 forward you will find that if you subtract out the fees American received from Citibank
from the AaAdvantage card you strip out all of the profit every year going forward.
companies
Never understood the draw of the lounge. We have been in them a few times, I would rather arrive at the airport a little later and have less waiting time than get there stupidly early to sit in a lounge. Maybe it’s just the airports we fly through.
Not sure how Vancouver comes in 9th liveable city. It’s expensive, traffic is terrible and the homeless are everywhere. Only good points are the climate and the location by the ocean.