Originally Posted by
notquiteaff
I suspect they want to optimize the profit from the card. Having packed lounges isn’t necessarily the way to achieve that. If they have people (like me) considering giving up their $695 card because the lounge is full of $60-paying AU families/friends, that presumably isn’t helpful to them.
I don’t think this is going to eliminate crowding at all times, but my impression is that the previous access changes have reduced the crowding to some degree, at least when I visited or peaked in.
I will say that my friends are all in the upper-middle-class-and-above target market, and their average opinion on the CLs has definitely soured a bit in the past couple years due to how crowded they have become. It is a tough balance for Amex to do - they want them to be relatively busy as the lounges have high fixed costs and fairly low marginal costs, but not so busy that people think they are way too packed and/or impossible to get into