LIH

As stated by several people up-thread, I am sure UA has the data about lounge-eligible pax volume. With that said, I would take a wild guess that a very formidable majority of lounge-eligible members are predominately business travelers and that even if they're flying around a bit, they're not flying nearly as much as they used to (I fit this bill, from 4-8 trips a month to 1-2 a month). Keeping the lounges closed could just as easily be a business decision by which they've rationalized that they don't really need to compete for the leisure-heavy travel flow (which they view as temporary) that's going through airports right now and that their business-focused pax will come back to UA in full force for all the same reasons they were UA-captives to begin with. I'm not saying that is good logic, but I don't think airline executives view their current operating environment as being reality in the scheme of things and they continue to make decisions to prioritize profitability with the idea that they'll always be able to make up for it by the time "real" business travelers return in force. In the meantime, you can find me in the concourse lounge bars, for the most part!

Lastly, I don't think the staffing end of this gets enough play here. I ran into a long-time RCC/UC bartender who used to work the evening slot at the C lounge at ORD (I used to commute ORD>LHR weekly). Junior is now at the Chilis in the F concourse (he recognized me as one of his regulars and said "looks like we've both taken a hit in this pandemic!"). He said that current contract on the UCs is up and he's hoping his group wins that contract back so he can move back to a lounge. I guess at ORD the current service provider does both the club cleaning as well as staffing the bar, which he said wasn't historically the case. He's hoping his group can at least get the bar contract back. Who knows if UA is trying to engineer some larger reordering of the cost curve for their lounges given the uncertainty around club revenue. All of that could cause even unintentional paralysis from a corporate decision making perspective. No UA exec is going to get a performance bonus for sticking their neck out to aggressively reopen clubs if it looks like a dumb decision in retrospect and it's hard to think of a scenario where it ends up looking like an impactful good decision from a business perspective.