When the Lounge Wait Is Longer Than the Flight

Someone on X said it this week. He shows up with two Platinum cards and gets told it’s a 45-minute wait for the Amex lounge. Feels like the biggest loser in the world.

Yes. That sting is real.

The card sold a quiet chair and hot food before boarding. What a lot of people get now is a line, a time limit, and a shrug.

I’ve already written whether airport lounges are still worth it. This is the uglier sibling of that question: when the wait for the lounge is longer than the hop you’re about to take, is the “perk” still a perk?

What the perk was supposed to be

A lounge job is simple. A chair. Something hot. Somewhere quieter than the gate. That’s it.

When you burn half an hour in a queue — or get waved at empty seats on the way in because seats go lightning fast — you’re not using a perk. You’re managing capacity.

I’ve had poor ones. Centurion at LAX. Centurion in Seattle. Food was poor. Service was poor. Both of them. Centurion at Hong Kong airport? My first time there, and I was not impressed.

HKG and MFM aren’t saving it

I fly out of Macau and Hong Kong a lot. Most lounges I’ve used there aren’t that good. Plaza Premium First at the Macau airport is fine — a chair, a buffet, noodles if you want them. Not special.

The lounges people praise at those airports are Cathay’s. I don’t fly Cathay. So I’m not going to pitch that lounge, and I’m not building a morning around it. Same line I used when I wrote about picking the earliest flight: the early bank is the plane already being here. The lounge is optional filler.

Platinum and Centurion still open doors. Doors into a crowd.

I’m not saying cancel the card. Access still matters on a messy connection day. A quiet corner when you luck into one still beats a gate full of rolling bags.

What I’m saying is stop treating the logo on the wall like a guarantee. If the board says 45 minutes, walk. Sit at the gate. Buy a sandwich. Use the time you’d have spent in line.

A perk that costs you more clock than the flight is not a perk. It’s a queue with better lighting.

Stay tuned… I’ll keep calling the lounge what it actually is that day — a chair, or a wait.