Originally Posted by
capedreamer
I agree with
RatherBeInYOW that people spending 3+ hours in the lounge (excluding connections) must be a relatively small proportion of all lounge goers (and I would venture skewing towards the FOTSG variety, so likely further reduced after the 35K access change). Of the remainder, I seriously doubt you'll have more than a rounding error of people buying a fully refundable ticket for an earlier flight just to access the lounge.
It might be "a relatively small proportion of all lounge goers", but if 20 "I hate spending time at airports" SEs each go for 15 minutes before their flight, that's 5 person-hours of lounge occupancy.
If one "I have non-stop meetings between lunch and flight" SE goes 5 hours before their flight, that's 5 person-hours of lounge occupancy.
In that example, the "more than 3 hours" is less than 5% of "all lounge goers", but they're 50% of the occupancy.
AC definitely has data on lounge entry and dwell time (which is the single metric they've publicly stated is causing all the issues), so I have to believe they think it will have a noticeable impact.