Originally Posted by
Artpen100
Unless one believes that the pandemic will go on indefinitely (and I confess it seems that way sometimes), at some point, some international travel will come back, and when it does, I suspect that some carriers will use things like a decent lounge and food and beverage onboard to capture ticket purchasers again. And once one does it, most of the rest will feel the economic pressure to compete. That is why UA started opening the Polaris lounges in the first place - competition. Even for the business traveler, many, like me, have some control over what airline I fly,
I don't doubt that both domestic and international travel will come back - the difference will be who is traveling. The old mix of business/leisure is now long gone, the new mix will be mostly leisure with a substantially reduced volume of business travel compared to 2019-2020. What is a completely open question is the spending willingness and ability of those leisure travelers when they come back - will enough travel often, and spend to validate the investment in lounges and other premium amenities, or are we headed back to the days before lounges, lie-flats, etc where travel was vastly simplified. That's really the open question.
Given that few, if any corporations pay for lounge memberships or access, yet the pre-virus lounges were rather busy, that does seem to indicate a substantial number self-pay members across the different lounge products, but many were credit-card members, whether that was United Club Card, Amex Platinum, etc. where lounge membership is an inclusion with other benefits. So I don't really see a long term drop in lounge customers or members per se, it will really depend on where people place value in the credit cards they are using to acquire membership. This leaves United/Chase at a significant disadvantage because Amex was able to pivot very quickly away from a travel-focused suite of benefits to something more services/retail focused which really extended the value proposition for the Platinum card vs United's cards which are travel focused and can't really make that change.