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. By 2023, amid the post-pandemic travel boom, John F. Kennedy Airport had increased its lounge space in Terminal 4 alone 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.
Some people fly just to visit a specific lounge. Others go to great lengths to get in. In 2016, at Changi Airport, in Singapore, a Malaysian businessman named Raejali Buntut missed a flight to Kuala Lumpur. He’d dozed off in the Plaza Premium Lounge. Instead of rebooking, he went to more lounges, hopping from one to the next, a total of thirty-one times. He didn’t leave the airport for eighteen days. He got into the lounges with a Priority Pass—a perk of his Citi credit card—and forged flight tickets. A staffer at one lounge eventually alerted the authorities. She received a special ceremony and a plaque. Buntut received a fraud conviction and was sent to jail, a place definitionally very similar to a lounge, but emotionally very different.
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Recently, I endeavored to visit as many lounges as I could in the span of a week without leaving New York, like Buntut but without the fraud. I have a fondness for free stuff and a willingness, on occasion, to sit around and do nothing. I do not have status—of any kind—but I do have a Priority Pass. Thus I found myself at the HelloSky Lounge, in a busy corner of J.F.K.’s Terminal 4.
Like a D.M.V. with couches, HelloSky had ceiling tiles, almost no natural light, and carpet that will take centuries to decompose. There were cheap Halloween decorations everywhere. Everyone seemed thrilled to be there. I sat down in front of a paper cutout of a witch. Nearby were Matt and Joann Gross, who were waiting for a flight to Memphis. “We’re going on a geriatric cruise down the Mississippi,” Joann explained. They were fans of HelloSky. “It’s really nice!” Joann said. “In here it’s less airporty.”
“It’s not very crowded,” Matt said. “I’ve been in some that are like being on the subway.