Skift Take
Despite the investment and focus on lounges to compete for and retain premium passengers, there's a lot of thinking left on the table. Here are some simple fixes to design a better experience on the ground.
The competition for the premium traveler is one of the fiercest in all of the aviation industry. There’s an escalating standard across the board, but particularly in the end-to-end of the experiences. Lounges play a huge role in this. Despite the investment and polish that goes into them, however, there’s still a lot of original thinking that is missing, especially as wellness and balance come front and center. Here are a few ideas for airline executives as they plan out their ground experiences for passengers.
Cleanliness
How many times have you sat in a crowded lounge filled full of used plates? Having marked busing stations allows a well-mannered guest to drop off a used coffee cup or plate on her way out. It saves the churn and burn on the employees and also provides people with an option to leave the lounge as it was when they first arrived. Alaska Airlines does this well with its lounges. In the words of the author and behavioral writer James Clear, "The central idea is to create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible."
Context shifting
People are in lounges with lots of different contexts: solo travel, larger group family travel, group work travel. Some people want to relax and zone out, some people need to figure out a way to work on a quick group presentation en route to the client. There’s a very intriguing case to be made for smart, modular context shifting. Cathay Pacific and Swiss do this well with their loun
