Anyone who regularly visits airport lounges knows that they offer the best and the worst in terms of services and respect for the most basic rules of community life. Who has never been bothered by the behavior of a particular passenger or group of passengers?
A recent incident at Qantas made us realize that few of these rules were actually formalized and rarely enforced.
Number of eligible passengers
In this case, airlines have formalized the rules and generally enforce them. Depending on the airline, the class of travel and the status of the traveler, only the traveler will have access to the lounge or will be accompanied by one person free of charge or by paying guests.
In hotels it is very clear: there are rooms that give access to the lounge or statutes that give access to it and to the other occupants of the room.
It is a known cost and easy to control so the rules are public and well applied in theory.
But there are still a few loopholes that weigh down the experience of other customers.
Example : a person eligible thanks to his status goes on a trip in eco with his family. He has the right to invite a person of his choice (his spouse for example) and, according to the rules of the airline, sometimes children under a certain age (it is not systematic). But too often we see the staff being too complacent and letting 2 or 3 kids through for free when they should be paying guests (which is in fact a technique used to prevent them from coming and the lounge from being overcrowded)
In hotel lounges, when the only key allows access without any other form of control, how many times do we see someone passing his wife, children and friends around? This is especially true during vacation periods: I remember a stay at the Sheraton Lisbon for example. The lounge was originally designed for a business clientele made up of people who travel alone, and here we had parents and children not even staying in the same room. It was unbearable and some even had to eat standing up!
I’m not even mentioning the person who imagined that his wife, who was not eligible because of her status, could access the lounge when traveling without him.
The issue here is not to avoid families, but to avoid lounges that are overcrowded, some of which are large enough to accommodate eligible passengers plus their families even at peak times, and others that are already struggling to contain those who are legitimately entitled to access them. And if the rules are known and easy to apply, they are not always applied with the necessary rigor.
Rules of conduct
No, you don’t do a standing conference call out loud in the middle of an airport lounge! And yet how many times have we been suffering it? I’m not even talking about confidentiality issues (it was easy to understand who the consultant in question was working for, the name of their client, how much the project had been sold for, why it was going wrong and how they were going to try to hide the problem from said client).
When you can enter the lounge with children you at least try to “hold” them. No running between the chairs, and no shouting of any kind. Here again…
As for the prohibition of telephone calls outside the reserved areas, you can still wait for it to be applied.
The funny thing is that these rules of good manners are not always explicitly written down, and for good reason: it is a matter of simple manners, of common sense. But things that seem obvious to everyone outside the particular context of an airport or a hotel.
Dress code
We often talk about the dress of air passengers and for good reason: some people allow themselves things in terms of behavior or dress that are a real lack of respect for other customers. To get an idea I recommend you follow Passenger Shaming on Instagram.
But sometimes it is not better in the airport lounges. Qantas, for example, has published a dress code that has the merit of being very clear.
So, of course, this provokes comments. At TravelGuys, we believe that it is legitimate for an airline to try to preserve the premium nature of its lounges because the passengers themselves expect a special experience. And after all, dress codes also exist in restaurants, hotels and even in resorts where in general things are tolerated that are not allowed in more classic hotels.
Then the question is to know where to put the cursor. The Qantas one doesn’t go in the direction of great tolerance but if they put it there it is because they must have reasons and feedback that led them to this decision.
This dress code has been talked about 10 days ago because of this tweet of a fitness model who was refused at the lounge in Melbourne because of her dress.
Frankly, we’ve seen worse in a plane or in a lounge, but as long as the rules are known, I don’t see why we should make a big deal of it: she wasn’t taken by surprise and I’m in no way shocked that the staff applied the rule to the letter.
What is more questionable is that her husband was accepted and she was rejected.
Some saw it as sexism. I see it as a loophole in the dress code, the husband falling in my opinion in a gray area.
Bottom line: for or against stricter lounge rules?
The subject of hotel and airport lounge congestion and the attire and behavior of those who frequent them is becoming more and more common in specialized forums and discussions.
In your experience, do you think that airlines and hotels should tighten the rules? Is it enough to apply the existing and the simple common sense?
Leave your opinion in the comments.
Photo : Qantas Lounge in Sydney by EQRoy via Shutterstock
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