Airport lounges

A lounge guest has ninety minutes and nowhere else to be. They arrive already tired and already processed twice, looking for three things in this order: a seat, a plug, and something to eat that is not sealed in plastic. The door is where a lounge is judged — the entitlement check that is quick and gracious, or slow and conducted in public in front of a queue.

Then it is a room that fills and empties on a timetable you do not control. At twenty to seven in the morning it is a canteen and at two in the afternoon it is empty, and the same standard has to hold across both. Almost every lounge is inspected in its quiet hour and experienced in its worst one.

And the departure is abrupt. A guest leaves in a hurry, usually alone, sometimes late. Whether anybody noticed, whether the boarding information on the screen was right, whether the final five minutes were calm — that is what they carry onto the aircraft, and it is the last thing your brand did for them.

• Lounges operated under a brand whose promise was written by somebody else, somewhere else.
• Anyone whose lounge is inspected at ten in the morning and lived in at six.
• Operators whose guests arrive from a flight as often as they arrive to one, and are treated identically either way.

• What the door was like at the hour it is busiest.
• How the room held up under load, rather than at inspection.
• What was available, and what had already run out, at the time a guest actually came in.
• What a guest recalled of those ninety minutes three days later.