For me, the access to Escape and Delta lounges has become a much more valuable perk of the Amex Plat than the Centurion Lounges.

As I’m sure many have said before, the SFO lounge is way too small to serve the large number of visitors. Really nice when not crowded, though.

Much the same could be said for the LGA lounge. Does SFO sometimes close off a section of the lounge for events? This week again during a visit of mine, the LGA lounge had a closed off section when the lounge was definitely too crowded for a couple to find anywhere to sit together — even too crowded for a single passenger to find a place to sit unless intruding upon an already occupied table/seat/seat bench/sofa. Nice otherwise, but I found the United Club (and probably also the separate Air Canada) lounge to be less crowded and more relaxing than the LGA Centurion lounge — and UC is where I went soon after snacking at the Centurion lounge.

There are still ways for some (myself included) to get the regular Amex Plat for free for a period of time. But those “free still” Plat cards’ users aren’t the reason why the Centurion lounges are so stuffed to the gills when they are.

And since the free Ameriprise version has gone away, the LGA Centurion lounge crowding seems to have gotten worse, not better, when comparing comparable times.

The free Ameriprise only went away a few months ago, which means everyone who applied for it within the past 8-9 months still has it.

The point remains that cutting the availability of the fee-free version of the Ameriprise Amex Platinum hasn’t followed with a decline in crowding problems at the Centurion lounges used by me. So for how long are people going to try to blame the overcrowded lounges on the increasingly rare fee-free Ameriprise card holders? If the fee-free Ameriprise users were such a big crowding problem, there should have already been an improvement of sort in the crowding situation, but there appears to be no improvement for me.

This makes no sense. Every person who no longer has the Ameriprise is one person fewer using the lounges — i.e., to whatever extent there’s a crowding problem, it would be worse with the old Ameriprise freeloader cohort.

I didn’t estimate anything. But we know (1) the number of Ameriprise holders isn’t/wasn’t zero, and (2) people weren’t getting a new Ameriprise card every year only to not use the perks.

Of course. But there are no products or services that have the same demand at $550/year as they have at $0/year. The population of former Ameriprise holders might very well be outstripped by growth in the numbers elsewhere, but every person no longer using the lounges is one fewer person who would be contributing to the (alleged) “crowding” problem.

The overcrowding situation at the Amex lounges would evaporate with a significant economic recession in the US married to a skyrocketing unemployment rate for university and post-university graduates and major asset price reduction in the real estate and equities markets.

Eliminating fee-free Platinum cards, marginally-raising Platinum card annual fees, and incentivizing couples/families to pay for additional user Platinum cards isn’t eliminating the overcrowding situation. If anything, it seems like that when couples/families have to pay for one additional user Plat card, more and more have learned to get three of the Plat cards to hand out — and you can go figure what that means during peak family travel periods when the top 7% of the population are doing so well financially.

Eliminating the Ameriprise Plat first year fee waiver wasn’t done to solve lounge overcrowding, and it still isn’t doing squat about that. And yet the Ameriprise card holders are still the bugbear for some when it comes to lounge overcrowding. Better to blame the American economy for the overcrowding situation than the rapidly dwindling group of fee-waived Ameriprise Plat card holders.