Who pay for you?

 Summary

You might never have cared who was paying for your airport lounge access (well, provided it wasn’t you!) but now you know – and it’s not necessarily who you might have thought.

Generally speaking when you’re flying in an eligible travel class, the operating airline of your flight either provides its own lounge, or foots the bill for a third-party facility or any other same-alliance lounge you choose to visit.

When you are accessing a lounge based on your frequent flyer status, it’s the airline you hold the status with that covers the cost for those third-party or alliance lounge visits, unless your travel class entitles you to access that lounge anyway, in which case it’s back to the operating airline (or marketing carrier) to foot the bill.

For lounge access schemes like Priority Pass, the annual fee for a set number of visits, or the cost paid per visit, is typically lower than what they pay the lounge operator, giving them a profit margin. For ‘all-you-can-eat’ tiers, such as those offered with some Singapore credit cards, they are simply betting that, on aggregate at least, the membership won’t bleed them dry!

Who’s paying for your airport lounge access?

Almost every time you enter an airport lounge, an unseen but crucial financial transaction happens in the background.

How does it work, and who foots the bill?

With pandemic restrictions long behind us and international travel thriving once more, airport lounges have regained their status as a vital part of the travel experience. Even in the Asia-Pacific region, which was slower to reopen, the resurgence in travel demand has made airport lounges more popular and competitive than ever.