We’ll see more and bigger lounges, sooner, which is really what I take away as the best news. A spokesperson tells me there will simply be “brief closure periods” during the course of construction work.Īmerican Express has Centurion lounges in Dallas Fort-Worth, Las Vegas, Miami, New York LaGuardia, San Francisco, Seattle, Houston, Philadelphia, Hong Kong, LAX, Phoenix and Charlotte as well as LAX which only opened on March 9.
It seems like many Centurion lounges could begin to re-open, albeit with modified service – servers bringing individual portions rather than everyone serving themselves from a buffet for instance. US air travel, while still off over 80%, is coming back a bit and we know much more about managing operations while minimizing risk. With the Hong Kong airport re-opening to transit passengers I think it’s time to re-open that lounge. If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past 8 years with the buildout of the Centurion lounge network it’s that quality lounges create their own demand, and will be busier than you think even accounting for that they will be busier than you think. However I suspect that even 50% growth won’t be sufficient for my own preferences. Just yesterday United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby declared “airplanes don’t have social distancing.”
More space and less crowding is the true future luxury in travel.