“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.