The lounge is for losers. Bring back the airport bar.

There's something special about the airport bar. There are no rules. No one will bat an eye at what you order — or what time. It's one of the last true democratic spaces left, a place that holds the full range of human emotions, from anxiety to excitement to despair. You bond with a stranger over a drink, swap stories, commiserate about a flight delay, and then disappear to separate gates, never to cross paths again. In a world where third spaces are dying, and consumers are being segregated between haves and have-nots at every turn, the airport bar has quietly endured.

But the airport bar is not-so-quietly under siege. Airport concessions took a hit during the pandemic, and while they benefited from the subsequent revenge travel, the rebound has stalled. Financially strained consumers are pinching pennies, including at airport vendors known to push prices.

Then, there is the bar's elitist counterpoint: the airport lounge. These spaces are increasingly overcrowded, and more and more passengers are wondering whether they're delivering the bang for their buck, but they're still a formidable competitor to the airport's more traditional food and drink options. When a new lounge opens near a restaurant or bar, the established businesses say sales often drop, sometimes by double digits. They also say they're not in a fair fight: airport bars have to turn a profit despite their high operational costs. Lounges, on the other hand, are largely marketing tools for airlines and banks — they are designed as perks to sell status and loyalty rather than to make a ton of money.

You're paying for the "free" stuff in the lounge in some way, shape, or form — say, with that $895-a-year Amex Platinum card — but you don't feel it in the immediate way you do a $25 glass of wine at the bar. Plus, in our increasingly tiered consumer economy, the lounge seems fancy. The airport bar is one of the few egalitarian experiences in an era where essentially nothing else about flying is. It's primed for a comeback — the next time your layover goes from one hour to two, instead of spending 45 minutes in line for the lounge, see what's up at the terminal tavern.

The airport is an unusual space to begin with. It's a place oriented around both mobility and immobility — it often takes as much time to get to your flight as it does to fly to your destination, if not more. This hurry-up-and-wait mode of travel creates anxiety for many passengers. Yes, you can sit at the gate and wait patiently for free, but that's not particularly fun.

This is an opportunity for airports, which generate hundreds of millions of dollars in retail revenue each year. Still, for the bars, restaurants, and retail shops that sign up to cater to airport customers, operating behind security is expensive. Businesses pay high rents, often share a percentage of their sales with airports, and must navigate the logistics of getting staff and inventory through checkpoints. All of this gets baked into your bar tab — that eye-popping price tag on a pre-flight gin and tonic is part of the cost of doing business in a captive, controlled environment. While airport retailers are supposed to be limited in how much they can upcharge you, it often seems like the limit does not exist.

The pandemic was, of course, a miserable time to be operating on the far side of TSA, but things are still rough. While passenger volumes at airports have bounced back, business for many retailers has stalled, says Andrew Weddig, the executive director of the Airport Restaurant and Retail Association. In 2024, a majority of ARRA's members saw an increase in same-store sales from the year before; in 2025, a majority saw a decrease. "Transactions and sales are sluggish," he says.

Part of the issue is affordability, as consumers search for places in their budgets to save. A trip to the airport bar is a pretty easy way to blow $50, but it's also easy to avoid. "We've got a general decline going on in the economy right now," Weddig says.

A bigger culprit of airport concessionaires' woes, he argues, is the lounges. Three-quarters of ARRA's members with lounges open nearby have reported a drop in sales, some as much as 14%. "It's hard," he says. "It's changing the flow of passengers."

Lounges are often installed when retailers are midway through their lease terms, instantly creating new competition and making concepts that may have made sense before the lounge obsolete. In a particularly nasty twist of fate, another major problem for airport businesses is credit card swipe fees, which card issuers use to pay for the lounges they're now losing business to.

Lounges are changing both the economics and culture of airports. They originated in the late 1930s and 1940s as literal private clubs, explains Kevin James, a history professor at the University of Guelph who has studied their development. After World War II, their super-restricted status eroded, and by the 1970s, "the exclusive, luxurious club idea was more or less dead," he says. Sure, there are some ultra-luxurious spaces somewhere in some airports, but in general, "travel has become more democratic, and so has the airport lounge."

But "democratic" doesn't mean open to everyone all at once. Access is organized by credit card, loyalty status, and day pass. The space is no longer reserved for a tiny elite class, but it is still gated.

As more people have gained lounge access, what's behind the gate is not so enticing anymore, or so friction-free. The areas are packed. Passengers often find themselves waiting in long lines just to grab a few free bites at the subpar buffet. Or, they present themselves at the lounge counter, only to be denied entry because their credit card or ticket no longer grants the same access it did after the airline or bank changed the terms. Lounges are still growing — a majority of frequent flyers visit them, and the lounge market is expected to reach nearly $10 billion in annual revenue by 2029 — but they're not all they're cracked up to be.

"The word lounge telegraphs something that almost invariably disappoints the lounge goer," James says. "It's kind of a glorified gate."

While lounges are a net negative for airport bars, the overcrowding situation may have some silver lining. Lounges drive higher-end consumers to certain airports and terminals, says Blaise Waguespack, a marketing professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. If those people find themselves in a situation where they can't get into the lounge, a nearby restaurant or bar may well become Plan B. "Very few of us say, 'Oh, wait, there's a line here, I'm just going to go sit outside the door and wait,'" he says.

Plus, unlike the lounge, the airport bar is never going to turn you away. "It's almost a humiliating experience for people because they walk up to the concierge and they flash their card and all of a sudden they discover that's not enough to get in," James says.

Beyond lounge culture, American culture is shifting around the airport bar as well. Young people are drinking less, so a stop for a beer to calm some pre-flight jitters may not be on the agenda. Others are eschewing an airport cocktail because in the age of social media and constant surveillance, if only by strangers with a cellphone, nothing you do is truly anonymous anymore. Have one too many or let something slip that would best remain private, and you risk becoming an unwitting internet star.

"Maybe the old days, where somebody might've sat there on a bar stool and drank their misery away, that behavior just won't fly anymore, if you will," Waguespack says. "Everybody's got a camera these days."

The airport bar is still open to everyone, but the freedom it offers is narrower.

None of this is to romanticize the airport bar. It's expensive. It's often crowded. The food and drinks can be mediocre. And there's a difference between having a pre-flight prosecco and getting so drunk you're denied boarding — a problem airlines wrestled with after the pandemic.

There is, however, something compellingly equalizing about the airport bar, especially when so much of the consumer economy has been stratified into tiers. The other passengers at the bar may be flying a higher class than you, or at least not stuck in the inferno that is basic economy, but we're all a bit helpless in the face of weather, delays, and whatever other unwelcome adventure our flight travels often have in store. And hey, maybe one of the rich people will feel bad for you and pick up your tab.

Outside the airport, consumers are constantly being nudged toward various loyalty programs and paid perks that offer a slight edge. You can pay to skip the line at Disney, shop special hours at Costco, or get your Lyft to show up a few minutes earlier. Corporations unbundle services and throw up walls as a way to extract as much money as possible from customers, recognizing that if you create a system of winners and losers, some number of people are willing to pay to be a winner.

The airport bar is one of the increasingly limited spaces in life that work against that. Sitting in front of the bartender, hoping no one will judge you for ordering that 7 am screwdriver after awkwardly climbing onto the barstool and nearly tripping over your luggage in the process, we are all equal.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.