AIR TRAVEL

Cartoon of a disappointed traveler holding a paper coffee cup in a packed airport lounge marked SKYLOUNGE, beside a picked-over breakfast buffet with a "seating full" sign.

Your airport lounge pass Is worthless—unless you do this

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The overcrowded airport lounge is no longer a perk. It is purgatory. Karin Kemp can tell you why. She had a four-hour stopover in Washington and thought it was the perfect chance to use her lounge pass. She was wrong. The lounge was full, an agent ordered her to wait, and she finally got in half an hour later. “There was barely anything left on the breakfast buffet,” she says. “If you could call it that.” That is the lounge letdown. What was once a quiet corner of the terminal, your reward for loyalty or a hefty annual fee, has become a cafeteria for the masses, with entry lines longer than the Starbucks queue, food gone by midmorning, and seats that take the sharp elbows of a subway commuter to claim. Blaming credit cards is the easy answer, and it is part of the story. But the real reason the lounge curdled, and what it will cost you to buy back anything resembling exclusivity, is where this gets interesting.

Minimalist black and white cartoon of a lone traveler with a rolling suitcase standing outside a nearly empty airport terminal, looking uncertain, evoking a trip thrown into limbo.

Let’s keep politics out of your summer vacation

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Steve Brody is flying out of Newark this week, and he is worried. There are plans afoot to pull the Customs and Border Protection officers out of airports in certain cities, with Newark Liberty International first in line. Brody, a retired government worker, is flying nonstop to Vancouver, but he has to pass back through US Customs on his return. “Gimme strength,” he says. He is not being dramatic. Customs officers are the people who let you back into the country, and pull them out and international flights cannot unload their passengers. That is the part that should bother everyone, left, right, and undecided. A passport does not have a party affiliation. When a flight gets canceled, the system does not check your voter registration before it strands you. You are stuck. Which is the real question worth sitting with before your next trip: whether the airport you are counting on this summer should ever be something an administration is allowed to switch off to win an argument that has nothing to do with you.

Is the TSA finally at its breaking point?

Is the TSA finally at its breaking point?

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The Transportation Security Administration is facing an existential crisis. 

In Houston, wait times at the screening area hit three hours this week. Atlanta and Philadelphia had to close entire checkpoints because they didn’t have enough staff. Now there’s talk of entire airports shutting down because of insufficient TSA screeners.

A slow plane comin'.

CONSUMER ALERT: Why your next flight might be stuck in the slow lane—and what to do about it

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If you’re heading to the airport this weekend, you might want to pack a little extra patience. As of midnight Friday, the Department of Homeland Security is out of money, and that means the people keeping our skies safe are back to working for IOUs. (We discussed the effectiveness of federalized security screeners on Saturday, and we’re still having a great conversation if you want to join.)

TSA

Do we need the TSA anymore?

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A looming government shutdown means the agency could lose its funding as early as this weekend, leaving 61,000 federal screeners to work without a paycheck.