One of the most irritatingly repeated complaints on air travel in India these days are about airport lounges being overcrowded. In most major Indian airports, lounges are running at capacity 24/7 and waiting times stretching up to an hour as queues to enter lounges are sometimes longer than check-in lines themselves. In their inherent privilege-complex mindset, it is common to see comments that say “airports have become like railway stations” because, hey, yeah we apply status hierarchies to modes of transport too, of course.
Anyway, most of us even didn’t know about airport lounges and their associated benefits until COVID times. It was post which the perfect storm of influencers educating Indians about “free food” at airports, aggressive credit and debit card marketing by banks, and the surging numbers of people taking to the skies did this phenomenon hit our shores.
So how do we solve this problem? The obvious solution would be to just increase the number of lounges in airports, right? Surely adding a couple more shouldn’t be all that difficult? Anyway there is so much of space around terminals and concourses. They could surely convert those shops selling overpriced clothing and wallets and stuffed toys and other useless knicknacks, which don’t seem to be doing any business anyway, into lounges? So why are they not doing it?
Airport lounges overcrowding is by no means an Indian problem, but has been a global issue for a long time. It is pertinent to note that most of those large global airports seem to be not very bothered to solve this. What most people everywhere do not seem to understand about building infrastructure is that the limitations holding things back is not physics or technology, but finance and economics. This holds true for airport lounges too.
Airport lounges are not core infrastructure
Airport infrastructure is famously expensive, and this isn’t because all people travelling on planes are millionaires. See, as far as airport operations are considered, it is the runways, taxiways, aircraft movement, parking, repair and storage, general ground operations, cargo and luggage processing and general airside operations are core focus and primary. Passenger terminals and facilities are built “around” all this critical infrastructure. They are designed with a set and “integrated” plan streamline airport operations with a view to deliver the most efficient, value for money services to the customers of the airport, which are, no, not the passengers, you silly twit, but the airline companies.
This means is that passenger terminals cannot be expanded beyond a point as you wouldn’t want them to encroach into the airport’s core business and reduce efficiency. This is why space for passenger facilities is very limited and hence comes at a tall premium. As an airport operator, would you want to waste all that limited space on lounges?
Lounges are never up there on priority for airport designers or operators because they take up a lot of space that could’ve been used for other more important functions. In addition, being a specialised operation, lounges have a very specific set of requirements which make things even more complicated. The best way to make sense of this to notice that lounges are often located at a secluded end or an upper level of the terminal concourse, away from the retail sections.
Though most people think of lounges as just shops or even restaurants, premium lounges are no less than a micro-hotel inside an airport. They need space and facilities that are not unsimilar to a hotel itself with operations very different from retail.
- Lounges need to have large floor plates, typically 10x of the regular retail store.
- They need large-scale plumbing, utilities, storage, food processing facilities, etc.
- People, provisions and garbage need to be continuously moved in and out of the lounge which means it needs to have physical backend service and supply logistics access.
- They need to have additional infrastructure like check-in counters and screening systems.
- Premium lounges are expected to have airside views.
Like any other large-scale transport operation like Metro lines or High Speed Railways, airports are also not designed and built on a whim but as complete, “integrated”, set units with clearly demarcations and purposes which in this case is to to streamline passenger flow and optimise operations efficiency and turnaround times for all departments. It goes without saying that trying to make random changes in those set plans will be difficult if not impossible, and expensive. For instance, a section of retail could be sitting directly above luggage sorting and transmitting systems which would make it impossible to route plumbing or provide a corridor for provisions and housekeeping for a lounge.
Well, it is still technically possible to add lounges inside an airport by converting existing sections. As you guessed, this is going to be prohibitively expensive and disruptive. No airport or lounge operator will be willing to take such risks just to add another lounge. Such plans are incorporated to be actioned only as part of periodic multi-million dollar airport expansion plans. The cost won’t make sense otherwise. We have seen what happens when you try to nonsensically change the location of a Metro Railway coach depot.
Not to mention that the airport operator would typically earn more from 10 retail stores compared to one lounge. And like we saw earlier, lounges weren’t even very popular until credit card issuers turned on the tap of complementary lounge access. The massive crowds would only last as long as the tap stayed open. Would you want to waste your valuable infrastructure on a facility whose popularity is completely dependent on factors completely outside of your control?
TL;DR: “Just add more lounges!” is easy to say but the amount of money it costs and disruptions it causes to airport operations is just not worth it.
And well, even if more airport lounges were built, it would not solve overcrowding, because the issue is not the number of lounges but the number of people trying to access them.
Why are airport lounges overcrowded?
What everyone seems to forget is that airport lounges were primarily intended to be “luxurious waiting areas” (with added-on features like food, showers etc.) for upwardly mobile types who didn’t want to deal with the riffraff at airports. At that time, complementary airport lounge access passes were rare, mainly offered by airlines to the doyens of their forward cabins or by some banks to their top-most clients as a customer service gesture. What lounges were absolutely not and still are not meant to be were common dining areas. It is also worth noticing that outside the frequent flyer crowd not many people even knew about the existence of lounges.
And then came around the mother of all disruptions, the times of COVID that turned everything on its head. By that time we had all nearly spent two years indoors and weren’t spending money or travelling. To get people spending again and to make up on all those lost times, banks started offering unbelievable perks on their credit and debit cards, with complementary airport lounge access being among the most attractive among them all. Nearly all debit cards had atleast one free lounge access on them per month, and even mid-level credit cards started offering anywhere from 12 to unlimited lounge access per year, domestic and international. And newly minted crops of influencers who sprung up on YouTube and Instagram (another legacy of the COVID era) started educating the masses about the “unlimited food for just Rs.2” at airports! The rest is history.
Suddenly lounges went from those posh, premium spaces for the selected few to the currently crowded common areas with everyone wanting to grab a slice of the experience earlier reserved for only a few. The elite connoisseurs of upscale airport experiences were not amused. “Oh no, those sacred spaces that offered us sanctuary from the proletarian hordes are being besieged by that very same lot!“, they exclaimed. Things got so bad that the same influencers who were earlier racking up millions of views on “Hack for free food at airports!” videos also started complaining that lounges are overcrowded. However, it wouldn’t last, things are now starting to look different.
No more free lounges
Sadly as it is, in the past few months Indian banks have been rapidly course correcting on their complementary lounge access policies. Yes, the age of free lunches (pun intended) seems to be coming to an end. And the reason for this has not been the rich crying victim, but the good old balance sheet. While it was absolutely welcome that everyone got a chance to experience what was until then limited to a few, this trend was unfortunately not sustainable, not for the lounges that are struggling to deal with overcrowding, or the banks who were seemingly losing money paying for each lounge access on behalf of their customers at a loss, who weren’t spending as much as the banks would like to, to justify their access.
Most issuers have now either removed (Axis, SBI Cashback) or severely curtailed (IndusInd, RuPay cards) or have made lounge access spend-based (HDFC, ICICI, BoB, IDFC First, Yes Bank, IndusInd, AU SMB etc.) on their credit/debit cards. Only a few super-premium credit cards of very few banks like Axis and HDFC seem to offer no-questions asked complementary domestic lounge access today. And these cards are very hard to come by. So if you still want to indulge yourselves you would mostly have to spend upwards of Rs.20000 a month or upwards of Rs.40000 a quarter on your your credit card to qualify. For instance all ICICI Bank credit cards require a quarterly spend of Rs.75000 for for accessing lounges during the next quarter.
“One more lane?”
Though banks are limiting access, it remains to be seen if this will really do anything to reduce crowds. If even a percent of those with eligible access try to get into lounges it will be enough to cause snaking queues. This is India. Everything is crowded. That said, even if we are going to build lounges to reduce access, it will end up only as good as building more lanes and roads to reduce traffic. The right approach is the prevent induced demand, which is what the banks are doing now.
I would also offer a hot take that airports are intended to be places to board a bus to your destination in the cheapest, fastest and most efficient manner. For indulgences, you would unfortunately have to pay.
Featured photo by Ankur Khandelwal on Unsplash
