[ DISCOVERY · THE DISPATCH ]

Why I Think Airport Lounges Are Making Travel Worse for Everyone

The lounge arms race sounds like a travel win — but I think it's quietly making the whole airport experience worse for everyone, including lounge members.

The last time I tried to use the Amex Centurion Lounge at Dallas/Fort Worth, the wait was 47 minutes. I know this because I stood in a zigzag queue — the kind with retractable belt stanchions usually reserved for theme park rides — watching a digital display tick down while my gate began boarding. I left, bought a $19 airport sandwich, and have thought about that moment ever since.

That’s the dirty secret of the current airport lounge gold rush: the thing that was supposed to make travel better is making it measurably worse. And I say this as someone who has held the Chase Sapphire Reserve, the Amex Platinum, and the Capital One Venture X all in the same calendar year. I have done the math obsessively. I have eaten the free warm nuts. I am not unbiased, but I am experienced, and my honest answer to “is an airport lounge worth it for a credit card?” is: it depends, and more often than people admit, the answer is no.

Airport lounges used to be genuinely exclusive — not in a snobbish way, but in the functional sense. They were quiet. They had empty chairs. The food was unremarkable but reliably available. Business travelers with real frequent-flyer status used them to decompress between flights, answer email, and eat something that wasn’t wrapped in plastic.

Then the credit card companies discovered lounge access as a selling point, and all three of the major premium travel cards started issuing Priority Pass memberships and building their own proprietary spaces. The Amex Centurion network, Capital One’s new lounges, Chase’s Sapphire Lounges — suddenly access went from “you have to fly 50,000 miles a year” to “you have to pay a $695 annual fee.” That’s a different, much larger pool of people.

The Centurion Lounge at LAX reportedly hosts over 1,500 visitors on a busy day. It was not designed for 1,500 visitors. The result is what you’d expect from any resource that got dramatically oversold: noise, crowding, 20-minute waits at the food station, no outlets near the few open seats. I’ve been in terminals during snowstorms that felt more serene.

Let me be blunt about the numbers, because the “lounges pay for the card fee” argument only holds up if you ignore the opportunity cost.

The Chase Sapphire Reserve runs $550 a year. The Amex Platinum is $695. The Capital One Venture X is actually the most reasonable at $395, and its lounges are currently the least overcrowded — though that’s changing fast. These cards all offer travel credits that are supposed to offset the fee: $300 for Chase, $200 airline + $200 hotel for Amex, $300 travel for Venture X.

Here’s the thing: those credits require you to spend money to recoup money you already spent. If you’re buying flights and hotels anyway and you’re organized enough to route them through the right portal, yes, the math works. But for a lot of people — particularly those who fly four or five times a year rather than ten or twelve — the “value” is theoretical. It exists in spreadsheets, not in practice.

I’ve run through a lot of trip-planning math over the years, and the honest pattern is this: lounges genuinely pay off for travelers who are in airports more than ten times annually and who have at least one long international connection per year. That’s a real but specific use case. It’s not the average leisure traveler who picked up an Amex Platinum because the sign-up bonus looked good.

Here’s the part that bothers me most, and it’s not about card holders at all.

Airport terminal investment is not unlimited. When airlines and airports funnel resources into increasingly elaborate proprietary lounges — the ones with the “locally inspired” cuisine and the nap pods and the shower suites — that investment has to come from somewhere. What it comes from, in practice, is the general terminal experience.

Walk through any major US hub — Atlanta, O’Hare, LAX, JFK — and look at the gate areas. The seating is aging. The charging stations are undersupplied. The food options hover between fast food and overpriced sit-down, with very little middle ground. The free wifi is adequate at best. Meanwhile, twenty yards down the concourse, there’s a lounge with Italian marble and a cocktail menu with a $0 co-pay if you have the right card.

I’m not making a political point here. I’m making a practical one: the airport experience has bifurcated, and the lounge-or-bust mentality is accelerating that bifurcation. I’ve written before about how booking decisions compound over a trip — the same compounding effect applies to infrastructure investment. Small advantages stack. Small neglects stack too.

I want to be fair, because this is not a monolith. Some lounge experiences remain genuinely excellent.

The Singapore Airlines SilverKris Lounge at Changi Terminal 3 is one of the best rooms I have ever sat in anywhere, airport or otherwise. The Cathay Pacific lounges in Hong Kong, the Lufthansa Senator Lounge in Frankfurt, the Air France La Première in CDG — these are products that match their premium positioning. They’re not overcrowded because they’re tied to elite status, not credit card access, which limits the pool.

Among US credit card lounges, the Amex Centurion in Seattle is still manageable most mornings. The new Capital One Lounge at DFW (the one that opened in 2023 near the D gates) has been genuinely pleasant in my experience — modern, spacious, the food is real food. If you’re flying through a hub with a newer or smaller-footprint proprietary lounge, the math changes.

Priority Pass is a different story. The program has degraded significantly over the past five years — many of the better airport restaurants that used to be included have been dropped or reduced to a single $28 food credit, and the actual Priority Pass lounges at US airports are, with a few exceptions, unremarkable. The Plaza Premium Lounge at JFK Terminal 4 is fine. Most are not fine. They’re just less-bad terminal waiting.

If you take fewer than six flights a year, lounge access is almost definately not worth structuring your financial life around. You’d be better served with a no-fee card that earns flat 2% back on travel, combined with the occasional Priority Pass day pass (most sell for $35–45 at the door) on the rare long layover.

If you travel with family — even small children — lounge access gets complicated fast. Many lounges have guest fees ($30–50 per person), and the Amex Platinum only allows two free guests. Bring a family of four through a Centurion Lounge and you’re paying $60–100 extra per visit on top of the annual fee. For families navigating long-haul travel, I’d point you toward resources like this guide on surviving Amsterdam with a baby — the energy is better spent on pre-trip logistics than on optimizing lounge access.

If you’re primarily a slow traveler — someone who takes three or four long trips a year rather than constant short hops — lounge access doesn’t fit the rhythm of your travel anyway. Slow travel is about neighborhoods, about staying somewhere long enough to learn its routines. It’s about the kind of immersive local experience I look for in cities like Chiang Mai’s moat-side neighborhoods. Airports are a means of transport, not a destination. Optimize accordingly.

Here’s my honest take after years of holding every major premium travel card:

If you fly eight or more times a year, often through major US hubs, have at least one long international connection annually, and are disciplined enough to actually use the travel credits — yes, one premium card probably pays off. I’d start with the Capital One Venture X right now because its lounges are still uncrowded and the fee is $300 less than Amex.

If you fly fewer than eight times a year, or you travel mostly with family, or you’re a leisure traveler who just wants to see the world — the lounge arms race is not your game. Skip the premium fee, take the $35 day pass when you genuinely have a four-hour layover, and spend the rest of that $500 on an actual experience at your destination.

The airport is not the trip. The trip is the trip.

The lounge arms race has made airports worse for everyone, including the people standing in line to use the lounges — so stop optimizing for the transit and start optimizing for what’s on the other end of it.

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