COMMENTARY

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.

Black and white line cartoon of a worried man standing beside his car with a flat tire on a city street, an American flag flying behind him and steam rising in the air.

America gave the world the gift of travel. Now it’s destroying it.

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America gave the world the modern vacation. But as the United States turns 250, it is on the verge of destroying it. The country pioneered the idea that an ordinary person could go somewhere purely for recreation. The long weekend, the affordable plane ticket, the great American road trip, all of them are U.S. exports. It is hard to overstate what this country did for travel: the world’s first national park, the first scheduled passenger airline, the interstate system that birthed a whole roadside culture, and the radical notion that a factory worker with two weeks off deserved a real vacation too. That is the inheritance. Now look at what we are doing with it, the airlines that treat your carry-on as a revenue line, the rental counter that doubles the online price, and a brand-new fee that quietly changed who gets to walk into a forest that is supposed to belong to everyone.

Black and white line cartoon of a puzzled man in a wheelchair on one side of a barrier looking toward a standing woman with a rolling suitcase on the other, suggesting a divide over who boards or pays. Ryanair family seating

Where’s the red line on airline fees?

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If you are flying with kids, here is a little good news: you will not have to pay extra to sit together, even on Ryanair, the notoriously fee-crazy Irish carrier. Europe’s largest discount airline adjusted its family-seating policy this week after a UK regulator forced its hand, having spent years charging parents a fee just to sit beside their own children. But it did so “reluctantly,” and that one word says everything about how the industry sees fees in 2026. A fee is not a problem to be fixed. It is territory to be defended. Which raises a bigger question, one that goes well past family seating to the water on a long flight, the bag already in your hand, and the seat you already bought a ticket to sit in. What kinds of fees should be off limits, and is there a line an airline should never cross?

Cartoon of a frazzled, dirt-smudged hiker waving both arms for help on a wooded shoreline beside her startled terrier, as a fisherman in a small boat approaches across the water.

No more digital detoxes? Why you should keep your phone with you when you travel

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Michelle Girasole thought she knew Rhode Island’s Beavertail State Park well enough to leave her phone in the car. It was a warm summer morning, and she wanted to catch the sunrise with her terrier, Scooter, and enjoy a few minutes without calls, texts, or notifications. Then she followed Scooter off the path and lost her bearings. She spent the next nine hours stranded, with no water, no sunscreen, and no way to call for help, until a fisherman finally spotted her on the shoreline. “If I had my phone,” she says, “none of that would have happened.” Her ordeal is a warning about the travel industry’s latest wellness obsession, the digital detox, which hotels and tour operators are selling as the only way to truly be present. Nearly every traveler says they want to disconnect. But there is a reason a row of security and medical-evacuation experts say that, for anyone without a private fixer, ditching your phone is not relaxation. It is something closer to recklessness.

Cartoon of a furious, wild-haired traveler raising a suitcase overhead as if to smash a laptop that displays a large red "BOOK" button on its screen.

Are you rage-booking your next vacation? Here’s how to stop

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It was a $12,000 vacation to Bali, booked late one night after a stressful business meeting. Sydney Ceruto, a neuropsychologist, remembers it well, because it happened to one of her patients. “She told me later she didn’t even want to go,” Ceruto says. “She just needed to feel like she was escaping.” We are living in the age of rage-booking, the impulsive travel purchase driven by exhaustion, anger, or heartbreak rather than any real desire to see a place. More than half of American travelers say they feel exhausted, and a striking share admit they have booked a trip purely to get away from their lives. It is reshaping how the whole industry sells to you, and some companies have figured out exactly how to profit from your worst, most depleted moments. The question is whether you can catch yourself before you click, and there are clearer warning signs than you might think.

Minimal black and white line cartoon of a wide-eyed traveler holding a rolling suitcase at an airport counter while an agent behind the desk gestures, suggesting a conversation about baggage.

The war is over. Let’s bring airline baggage fees down now.

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Peace negotiators may be dotting the i’s on a deal to end the Iran war, but air travelers are paying attention to something else: the cost of their checked bags. Remember when jet fuel prices spiked after the fighting broke out earlier this year? Every major American airline rushed to raise its checked bag fees. United, American, Delta, Southwest, JetBlue, they all went up. The airlines blamed the war, and at the time they had a point, since fuel had roughly doubled. But then the ceasefire came, oil pulled back from its highs, and guess what? Not one airline has announced it is bringing its luggage fees back down. There is a name for this pattern, and once you see how it works, and what Europe just did about bags while U.S. carriers went the other way, the summer ahead at the airport starts to look very different.

Black and white cartoon of a small couple with suitcases standing on a dark horizon, watching a paper airplane folded from a banknote fly up and away into a vast cloudy sky.

Air travelers deserve stronger consumer protections—in Europe and the U.S.

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Mila Schoun knew what his downgrade was worth, but his airline pretended it did not. Schoun and his wife had paid Swiss International Air Lines for premium economy on a flight from Prague to Miami, and then the airline changed aircraft and put them in regular economy for the 10-hour crossing. He asked for the difference back. Swiss refused. What Schoun had on his side, even if he had never heard of it, was EC 261, a 21-year-old European regulation that makes airlines pay when they cancel, bump, strand, or downgrade you, and that quietly protects millions of Americans on any flight leaving an EU airport. Europe just spent the spring fighting over whether to gut that law, with the airline lobby pushing to raise the delay threshold and erase most claims. Passengers appear to have dodged the worst of it. But there is a quieter problem that no one in Brussels lobbied for and no one fought against, one that has been draining the value out of this protection for two decades while everyone argued about something else.

Black and white cartoon of a frazzled airline passenger facing a smiling gate agent at a counter, who holds up a document labeled "OUR RULES," illustrating the gap between what travelers want and what the DOT's disclosure rule actually delivers.

Congress asked for passenger rights. It got a PDF

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Airline passengers are tired of standing at the gate while agents hand out excuses. The Department of Transportation has a fix. Soon, airlines will hand out a piece of paper instead. The DOT just finalized a rule requiring airlines to publish a one-page summary of passengers’ rights. Congress ordered it eight years ago. The rule does not set any compensation amounts. It does not require meals, hotels, or rebooking when there is a delay. Each airline only has to briefly summarize its own existing policies, in whatever format it likes. The rule also skipped the public comment period, and in a detail that is hard to make up, the summaries are not even due yet, because carriers cannot submit anything until a separate government approval process is complete. When the regulated industry shrugs at a new regulation, that means something, and this rule drew no objection at all.

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.