October 24th - Why there are so many airport Lounge Lizards
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 24 October 2023
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
Lounge lizards: one in four people say they pay for an enclave of calm for a couple of hours before their flight.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder on Tuesday the 24th of October |
| 0:09.0 | and I would like to bring you the results of a remarkable social media survey that I have conducted. |
| 0:16.9 | Now I need absolutely to stress that this is a self-selecting bunch of people, but 13,000 people very kindly took the trouble to vote on on X, formerly known as Twitter, and I was astonished by the results. And what's it all about? that fantastic lounge experience um i was really keen to find out |
| 0:43.3 | how people felt about airport lounges as you will be aware if you've traveled anywhere in |
| 0:51.2 | the past year or so um airports are are getting very, very, very crowded. |
| 0:57.2 | Stansford, for example, pretty much up to the normal level of passengers that they had before COVID. |
| 1:07.1 | I was there recently on a Thursday afternoon. |
| 1:09.1 | Very, very crowded. |
| 1:10.6 | So I slipped into the lounge there |
| 1:13.9 | only there was a waiting list. So I didn't slip in very quickly. And that's being met this |
| 1:21.3 | extreme demand by people wanting to, but by an expansion of lounges. Now, here's the question, have you been |
| 1:31.3 | tempted to pay around £30 for two hours in an enclave of calm before your flight departs? |
| 1:37.4 | If you've flown from a UK airport in the past year, join the poll answering about your |
| 1:42.5 | most recent flight. And of those people, well, 48%, so |
| 1:48.9 | almost half, didn't pay for a lounge. 24% said, well, yeah, we have lounge access and so therefore |
| 2:00.0 | we get in anyway, and that will be either because of |
| 2:03.6 | status of your flying at the right fare or you've got status with an airline because of your |
| 2:11.6 | high spending or maybe even your company's high spending on your travel and good luck to you but then 27% of people say that |
| 2:22.3 | they paid for lounge access and i was really interested to drill a bit deeper in this and find out |
| 2:31.2 | what um what what people were doing and well yes it's for effectively those who feel that |
| 2:39.2 | like Jean-Paul Sartre you believe hell is other people and you could well spend that money |
| 2:47.2 | possibly more than the cost of your flight if like me you're going for a really cheap |
... |
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