“In 2016, at Changi Airport, in Singapore, a Malaysian businessman named Raejali Buntut missed a flight to Kuala Lumpur. He’d dozed off in the Plaza Premium Lounge. Instead of rebooking, he went to more lounges, hopping from one to the next, a total of thirty-one times. He didn’t leave the airport for eighteen days.”
There are more than 3,500 airport lounges in the world. Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok has thirty-seven. Roughly one for every two gates. Kasane, Botswana, a town of about ten thousand people, has an airport smaller than some lounges. It has an airport lounge. Three of the four lounges in Punta Cana’s airport have outdoor pools. JFK Terminal 4 alone now has seventy thousand square feet of lounge space. About the size of Bill Gates’s mansion.