By Alison Sider

Bartenders sling specialty cocktails in a speakeasy-style bar. A cheesemonger doles out tastings. Three-course meals include steak tartare and hamachi crudo. Spa-like showers with bathrobes and massage appointments offer a respite.

These amenities are all inside Terminal 4 at New York's JFK International Airport, one of the hottest battlegrounds in the new war for airport-lounge supremacy.

Across the nation's airports, airlines and financial institutions are clamoring for the thousands of square feet needed to build ever more opulent lounges and one-up each other's amenities. Gone are what one lounge designer called "lamp farms" -- row upon row of table lamps next to identical club chairs filled by laptop-laden executives content with a power outlet and a basic buffet.

"It should feel like a luxurious almost resort-like experience when you're there," said Matt Knise, head of travel and premium product experiences at Capital One. In June, the bank opened its largest lounge yet at 13,500 square feet, just beyond security in JFK's Terminal 4, where Ess-a-Bagel bagels finish baking on site and that cheesemonger serves personalized samples.

Exclusive lounges -- one of the few aspects of flying that travelers seem to enjoy -- are driving increased loyalty for credit-card companies and airlines. The goal is to create a network of airport lounges that will persuade a customer to pay hundreds of dollars a year for a high-fee credit card that will help them gain entrance.

And it's working. "Lounge access is the No. 1 reason that people will acquire our co-brand" Reserve card with American Express, said Dwight James, Delta Air Lines' senior vice president of customer engagement and loyalty.

Customers have been undeterred even as card fees continue to climb. Amex is the latest to raise the annual fee on its Platinum card, this past week hiking it to $895, from $695, and making it once again the priciest card in its segment. Those affluent cardholders will now get even more perks, particularly when it comes to lifestyle and travel benefits.

JFK's Terminal 4 now boasts more than 135,000 square feet of lounge space -- over half of it added since the beginning of 2023.

Delta, which moved all its JFK operations to the terminal a few years ago, has two Sky Clubs there. Last year it opened its first 39,000-square-foot Delta One lounge, reserved for people flying in its long-haul business class or the equivalent on a partner airline. The Delta One lounge has a private security lane, a terrace with a retractable roof overlooking the tarmac, aromatherapy treatments and a brasserie serving three-course meals.

Down the hall, the Chase Sapphire Lounge, a partnership between JPMorgan Chase and Etihad Airways, has specialty cocktails and showers. Amex's Centurion Lounge boasts a barista coffee bar, a tucked-away, dark-paneled cocktail bar and a dedicated space for families.

Luring customers into a premium lounge isn't about selling them expensive drinks and spa treatments. Most of the amenities within these exclusive spaces come at no extra charge.

Airlines team up with credit-card providers and sell them miles to dole out as rewards for spending on co-branded cards. Delta made more than $7 billion from Amex last year and says it's on track to bring in $8 billion this year.

When Delta announced plans to build a lounge at the Kansas City airport in 2022, "the moment we put 'coming soon' on a new lounge, we saw a spike in co-brand new accounts," James said. Once the lounge opened, card sign-ups climbed even more.

JetBlue Airways is building its first lounges in New York and Boston. Even Southwest Airlines, once a bastion of single-class, egalitarian flying, is considering building lounges.

"The lounge access as a card benefit is what allows you to offer a $495-, $595-a-year card," Southwest Chief Executive Bob Jordan said this month. "It's a huge potential additive" to the airline's loyalty program.

In recent years, credit-card companies started opening lounges to lure big spenders to their own premium cards. These cards -- like the Chase Sapphire Reserve, the Capital One Venture X and the American Express Platinum card -- offer travel perks that aren't limited to a single airline.

Amex built its first airport lounge in Las Vegas in 2013 and now has 30 of them. When Capital One was developing its Venture X rewards card, customers it surveyed said that they valued travel perks above anything else, but that most lounges felt outdated. It opened its first lounge, with sleep pods and a Peloton workout room, in Dallas in 2021. Chase Sapphire opened its first airport lounge in 2022 in Hong Kong, with its first U.S. lounge in Boston the following year. Chase estimated it will spend $23 million building out a new lounge in Los Angeles, with a proposal to include a service to whisk VIP guests to their gates in electric vehicles.

The new class of lounges isn't just for frequent fliers with top-tier airline status or people flying in first or business class.

Ashley Dowell, a design director who focuses on airport lounges at architecture firm Gensler, said clients say their target customers used to be male business travelers over 40. "And now it's completely different. It's all generations," she said. "Designing an airport lounge is basically designing a boutique hotel that gets met by 3,000 people a day."

That has raised the bar for the types of perks customers expect at lounges, putting pressure on airlines to up their game.

In Phoenix, a silver Airstream trailer retrofitted as a food truck is perched on an indoor patio at the Chase Sapphire lounge that opened last year. Maneuvering the trailer into the airport took "a host of coordinated efforts," according to minutes from an airport advisory board meeting last year. It had to be carefully hoisted through a window into the terminal, then rolled to security for screening.

Some travelers say they wish the 3,500-square-foot space was bigger. The lounge instituted a reservation system in June to help with crowding, and is looking for ways to expand.

Travelers returning to the skies after the pandemic amassed stockpiles of points, after earning status just by swiping their credit cards. They flooded into lounges, and years later, they haven't given up the habit. Crowding has become a problem, threatening to undermine the premium experience with long waits and fights for chairs.

Henry Yu, 54, isn't loyal to a single airline, but he is a devoted lounge user. To ensure he can always get into one on his roughly two dozen trips a year, he keeps three cards in his wallet: the United Club card, the Delta SkyMiles Reserve and the Amex Platinum. The cards offer other perks that help him justify rising annual fees, but the lounges are the main attraction.

"Being able to have lounge access is huge, so I'm not at a crowded gate or have to overpay for water or snacks," he said.

Airlines and card companies have tightened the requirements on who can get into lounges and how long they can stay, and some offer digital access to wait times.

The lounge building boom is far from over.

American Airlines this year opened a new flagship business-class lounge in Philadelphia -- which also gained a new 20,000-square-foot Chase Sapphire club -- and announced plans for a new one in Charlotte. "We are participating in the lounge competition -- the arms race in lounges," Steve Johnson, chief strategy officer at American, told investors at a conference earlier this month.

United just revamped its international business-class lounge at O'Hare International Airport, complete with Crate & Barrel decor. In July it reopened an expanded 33,000-square-foot mega lounge in Denver.

Delta replaced two smaller clubs with a much bigger lounge at its Atlanta hub.

For airports, the challenge is finding room.

Last year in Atlanta, Amex opened its biggest Centurion lounge yet -- right on top of a baggage-handling facility. "That had its own set of challenges," said Audrey Hendley, president of Amex Travel.

Smaller spaces are also popping up. The Amex Sidecar lounge in Las Vegas plans to serve signature drinks and gourmet small plates to fliers not planning to stay more than an hour or so.

Dallas Fort Worth International Airport has been able to use a mezzanine floor where other retail never took off to accommodate growing lounge space.

And the lounge footprint at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is on track to more than double. With little room to expand outward, Seattle has built up: It persuaded dining and retail tenants to shift some storage space to build out a second story for an Amex lounge.

"We're definitely hitting up against that ceiling when it comes to space for lounges," Port of Seattle Commissioner Sam Cho said.

Write to Alison Sider at alison.sider@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 19, 2025 22:00 ET (02:00 GMT)

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