Airport Lounges: For the Many or the Few?
The Bottom Line
BBC
4.6 • 615 Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2026
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the years after the COVID pandemic we are travelling more and expecting more from our journeys. Travel is increasingly viewed as an end-to-end experience that begins before you even set foot on board your flight. As people look to inject luxury into their travel, airport lounge usage has boomed.
But lounges’ rise in popularity has created a unique problem for their operators: how do you grow your customer base whilst maintaining a degree of exclusivity?
Evan Davis speaks to industry operators and experts about balancing the scales.
Guests: Mignon Buckingham, CEO of Airport Dimensions Claude Roussel, VP of Sky Clubs and Lounge Experience at Delta Airlines Nicky Kelvin, Senior Director of Content at The Points Guy
Production team: Presenter: Evan Davis Producer: Mhairi MacKenzie Production Co-ordinator: Katie Morrison Sound engineers: Dave O’Neill and Tim Heffer Editor: Matt Willis
The Bottom Line is produced in partnership with The Open University
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts. |
| 0:05.7 | Hello, you're about to listen to a BBC podcast, and I'm Ed Gamble, host of another BBC podcast, The Traitors Uncloaked. |
| 0:12.7 | But my show is available only on BBC Sounds, just like Ellis and John's Saturday bonus episodes, |
| 0:18.2 | The Pop Top Ten podcast with Scott Mills and Rylan, and comedy specials |
| 0:22.2 | from the likes of Harriet Kemsley, Susie Ruffle and Rommashranganathan. However, and maybe I'm biased, |
| 0:27.9 | it's really all about The Traitors Uncloaked. So for a whole bunch of exclusive scoops and podcasts, |
| 0:33.4 | listen only on BBC Sounds. Hi there, thanks for listening to The Bottom Line. |
| 0:37.8 | We're here every week and on Radio 4, and this week we're talking about airport lounges. |
| 0:44.1 | Before we do that, though, a quick plug for a recent episode of the bottom line on chaos management, |
| 0:50.0 | where we looked at whether fewer rules in the workplace and a bit of chaos make businesses |
| 0:54.2 | better and more creative. Does chaos drive innovation or leave everybody confused? Anyway, let us get |
| 1:02.0 | to the main episode today. Hello and welcome to the program. The concept of the airport lounge |
| 1:09.6 | goes back to the 1930s when they were strictly for the elite. |
| 1:13.5 | Invite only, the first airport lounge apparently allowed members to stash bottles of their |
| 1:18.4 | favourite alcohol behind the bar for consumption on future visits. It was, let's face it, a very |
| 1:23.9 | different era for travel and it's one that didn't really include most of us. |
| 1:28.3 | Well, over the decades since then, flying's obviously taken off, travel for the masses has become the norm, |
| 1:35.3 | and the provision of airport lounge services has exploded with lounges run by airlines, by credit card companies and third-party operators. They've opened up a world of luxury to evermore travellers. |
| 1:48.6 | But I say the word luxury here in slightly inverted commas, because you will sometimes hear the most elite passengers complain. |
| 1:55.7 | The airport lounge experience isn't always what it used to be. It seems the industry is in a difficult struggle to meet |
| 2:01.8 | customer expectations. How do you both grow the numbers while maintaining a degree of exclusivity? |
| 2:08.9 | It is an intriguing business challenge which makes the airport lounge a great topic for us on |
... |
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