As a business traveler who flies about 100,000 miles a year, Tim Pearson remembers spending too much time in crummy airport clubs, eating stale sub sandwiches, slurping cold soup and scrounging for power strips. 

Now, he’s one of the beneficiaries as airlines make long overdue upgrades to the enclaves set aside for their most valuable customers. His favorite is the Delta Sky Club at New York’s Kennedy Airport, where a retro vibe brings out his inner Don Draper. 

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“It’s a beautiful lounge. It’s got very much of a ‘Mad Men’ kind of a feel to it,” said Pearson, 56, evoking the television drama about 1960s advertising executives. “You’ve got to have a cocktail the minute you walk in.”

Flush with record profits, the three biggest U.S. carriers are pampering loyal road warriors like Pearson and seeking to entice new recruits. American, United and Delta airlines are investing millions of dollars to spruce up the sights, sounds and even smells of airport clubs that suffered from years of neglect amid $58 billion in industry losses from 2001-2009.

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They’re targeting travelers who are in airports so often that they’ll pay as much as $450 a year to pass the time in a quiet, spacious sanctuary featuring complimentary snacks, drinks, charging stations and showers.

‘Wanderlust’ Scent

United Continental Holdings Inc. is spending about $100 million over five years to jazz up 49 lounges around the world. In March it introduced a new food menu, including trendy Greek yogurt, and plans to build new clubs in Atlanta and San Francisco. American Airlines Group Inc. has concocted a signature scent — Wanderlust — for new toiletry products at its clubs and offers a line of soups curated to palates in different destinations as part of a more than $2 billion plan that will also see aircraft cabin upgrades.

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Delta Air Lines Inc. built a 24,000-square-foot (2,229 square meter) flagship club at JFK with an outdoor terrace in 2013 as part of a $1.2 billion investment in Terminal 4, and rolled out new menu items in August featuring fresh bagels and fruit salads. The Atlanta-based carrier plans to add charging stations, new carpet and tile to line its Los Angeles Delta Sky Club when that reopens in June. 

“It’s really an embarrassment of riches right now,” said Robert Mann, head of aviation consultant R.W. Mann Co. in Port Washington, New York. “It’s literally that you’ve run out of fence posts under which to hide the money. A lot of programs that would have been shelved for lack of funding have now been advanced to the front lines and are being accelerated.”

Big Three

The club competition centers mainly around the big three airlines. Discounters such as Southwest Airlines Co. and Spirit Airlines Inc. focus on no-frills service and lower ticket prices, not the cosseting of their highest-fare fliers.

“As an industry that has struggled for decades, you looked for places where you could invest with very limited capital,” American’s Global Marketing Vice President Fernand Fernandez said. “Now as you look forward, what we’re seeing is we have the ability to go invest in some of the products that our customers are very keen about.” 

Pearson, who works for branded documentary producer Flow Nonfiction in Minneapolis and has been a Delta Sky Club veteran for about 15 years, remembers the times when it was “cut after cut” in amenities offered at clubs. Those days are fading fast, he said.

“The changes in the last few years have been night and day,” he said in a phone interview March 12.

Amex Lounges

Airlines aren’t the only ones trying to woo customers by making airport waits more bearable. Credit-card companies are elbowing in, too, working with airlines to offer lounge membership like American’s deal with Citi/AAdvantage Executive World Elite MasterCard members.

American Express Co. is adding Miami this year to its list of four Centurion Lounges in the U.S. after opening other outposts overseas in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo and New Delhi.

“They’re trying to make card-holding more attractive by offering this exclusive service that is only available to cardholders,” said Jay Sorensen, an aviation consultant with IdeaWorksCompany and former executive at Midwest Airlines.

As with credit-card companies, the airlines are seeking to ensure that a travelers’ good club experience translates into customer loyalty. Passengers tend to spend on average 63 minutes in the lounge, enough to make an impression and convince them to return, according to Jimmy Samartzis, vice president of customer experience at United.

Membership Fees

Memberships in the clubs can cost from $450 annually for individual Delta Sky Club members to $825 for a household to purchase access to American’s Admirals Club for a year.

Increasingly, airlines have begun offering one-day passes that open the clubs to non-members. At Forth Worth, Texas-based American, many of American’s customers who purchase the $50 one-day passes convert to a full membership within weeks if not days, Fernandez said. 

The airlines are sowing the revenue from the day-passes back into the lounges to keep up with foreign competitors like Virgin Atlantic, based in Crawley, England, that have spent more over the years on plush clubs, said Sorensen, the IdeaWorksCompany consultant.

“This is what airlines do when they make money — they reinvest part of that back into the product, and the industry has been starved for profits for so very long,” he said. “I’m delighted to see that they are plowing back some of that into making the travel experience better for the travelers.”

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Checked baggage: how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways: (1) fees; (2) time lost at check-in counters manned by (3) uncaring staff; (4) possible damage in transit; (5) lost baggage; (6) filing claims for said lost or damaged baggage…

And most of all, (7) waiting around like a doofus at baggage claim when I’m tired and cranky and just want to get a move on already, with no info from the airline about when the baggage will arrive. More times than I’d care to count, I could have been home by the time my baggage and I were reunited at the carousel.

Finally, one of the big three U.S. airlines is doing something about it. Delta’s Bags on Time program – started on a trial basis in February and made permanent last week – promises to deliver luggage from domestic flights to the baggage carousel within 20 minutes after the plane door opens. If the wait is longer than 20 minutes, members of Delta’s SkyMiles frequent flier program can claim 2,500 frequent flier points. That’s a penalty with some teeth since it’s the same award basic SkyMiles members would get for purchasing $500 in airfare.

Next time Delta customers have to wait for more than 20 minutes at baggage claim, they could be compensated with 2,500 frequent flier points (Photo by Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)

Since the February trial launch, “Customer feedback has been positive, and employees are rallying to achieve the 20 minute threshold,” says airline spokesperson Morgan Durrant.

To me, the peace of mind of knowing when my luggage will arrive takes the pain out of gate-checking my bag when the overheads are full, and it might just tip me toward paying $25 for the first bag ($35 for the second bag? Meh, still not so much.). After all, at many airports, it can take 20 minutes just to get from one’s seat to baggage claim.

Bags on Time does not cover damaged or lost baggage, or checked baggage on international flights.

Why is Delta doing this? Let me count the ways (they’re a lot simpler). (1) Customers like it: it’s an excellent differentiation point from the other big carriers. (2) Competition: Delta’s been trying to build up its hub in Seattle, where its main competition, Alaska Airlines, has had a similar 20-minute bag delivery policy for years. Although Delta probably won’t admit this, it would be foolish not to keep up.

The Endeavor Air flight, a subsidiary of Delta Airlines, was leaving Detroit Metro Airport when the end of the wing hit the side of the terminal after backing from the gate. No one was injured.

Delta Airlines is leading an effort to petition the US government to sanction Etihad Airlines, Emirates Airlines, and Qatar Air. They charge that these three airlines have received government subsidies and are unfairly competing with US carriers resulting in a loss of jobs for American workers. Delta and its partners in the coalition it has formed, “Americans for Fair Skies”, have submitted a brief of their complaint to Congress, started an online petition campaign, and are sponsoring TV and radio ads to make their case against the three Arab air carriers.

I’ve read the brief and listened to the content of their ads and the statements made by their spokespeople and I am concerned?not because the US coalition presents a compelling argument. They do not. What is troubling is that precisely because their case is weak, the US coalition has shamefully stooped to subtle and not so subtle “Arab-baiting” in their efforts to demonize the Arab carriers.

In one ad, for example, Etihad, Emirates, and Qatar Air are described as coming from the “oil rich Arabian peninsula” and are guilty of receiving “billions of government oil money”. If you didn’t get the point, there’s a graphic accompanying the ad showing an Oriental-looking structure that turns out be an Arab bank/gas pump that is pumping dollars into an airplane. So much for subtlety.

One of the leaders of the effort, Delta Air Lines CEO, Richard Anderson, threw all subtlety to the wind in a mid-February CNN interview. Noting that the Arab carriers had rebutted the allegations that their governments had “subsidized” their operations and countered with the charge that the US airlines, themselves, had been the recipients of a $15 Billion Congressional financial package after 9/11, Anderson said.

“It’s a great irony to have the UAE from the Arabian Peninsula talk about that, given the fact that our industry was really shocked by the terrorism of 9/11, which came from terrorists from the Arabian Peninsula”.

An Emirates spokesperson responded by noting, in part, that “we believe that the statements made this week by Mr. Anderson were deliberately crafted and delivered for special effect.” His assessment is “spot on” because Anderson’s crass comments and the content of the US coalition’s ads are all part of a tried and tested strategy used for effect by politicians and businessmen alike.

For example, in their effort to win public support for renewable energy, liberals, environmental groups, and companies that would benefit from the expanded use of wind and solar power, could make an environmental impact argument or a case for resource conservation?all of which are important and defensible concerns. Instead, they have, all too often, fallen-back on “Arab-baiting”. Speaking at the Democratic Convention in 2008, for example, then Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer repeatedly referenced “Arab oil” or “Middle East oil”. Each time he did so with snarl and each time he was greeted by thunderous applause. And in a famous 2009 TV ad promoting energy independence, sponsored by T. Boone Pickens, the same point is made by ominous-sounding Arabic music against a desert backdrop featuring burning oil wells guarded by American soldiers, with Arabic script thrown in for good measure.

All of these efforts have been, in fact, studied and deliberate. Pollsters who have conducted focus-groups on this issue have established that if a politician speaks about “dependency on oil” he gets a much less emotional response from his audience than he would get if he were to add “Arab” or “Arabian” or even “Middle East” as a modifier. And just as politicians pay attention to such polling data, so do CEOs about to launch a major campaign.

The campaign, itself, is based on a series of weak and flimsy charges of subsidies and protectionism. In reality, the US aviation industry was founded on both. To make the point, in 1998 Congressional Research Services completed a study of US government subsidies to American aviation from 1918 to 1998. The total was $155 billion and was deemed essential “to foster the growth of what has become the commercial aviation industry…in keeping with the aviation sector’s embryonic nature”.

In addition to the post 9/11 bailout and loan guarantee bills, the US government continues to fund infrastructure and operational services and to provide subsidies to US airlines for: “Essential Air Services” (subsidies underwriting costs for airlines to keep smaller markets on their routes); the “Reserve Air Fleet” (subsidies for agreeing to make their planes available, if needed, to the government); and an indirect subsidy in the form of the requirement that government employees must “fly American”. In addition, airports and the air traffic control infrastructure are built and maintained by tax-exempt entities. And then there is the Federal Law prohibiting foreign carriers from flying passengers between US cities.

As for the charge that the growth of Etihad, Emirates, and Qatar Air has cost thousands of American jobs, in fact, the opposite is true. At the 2013 Dubai Air Show, three UAE-based airlines announced purchases of Boeing aircraft totaling $130 Billion, which according to Department of Commerce estimates will support almost 500,000 US jobs. Add to that the jobs created and supported by past purchases by just Etihad and Emirates and over 200,000 American workers have benefited from the growth of these two airlines. And then there are the thousands of jobs supported by these airlines at US airports and maintenance of aircraft.

One additional charge made by the US coalition to make their case is that Emirates is “stealing passengers from US carriers” is that Dubai is building a mega-airport too large for the UAE’s small population. What, of course, this charge ignores, is that the new airport is being constructed to support Dubai’s hosting of the 2020 World Expo.

The bottom line is that the US coalition’s case is weak, at best, and disingenuous, at worst. And because they don’t hold up, “Arab-baiting” appears to be the coalition’s last resort. It may be a way to prey on fear and deep-seated biases, but it’s a shameful way to try to win an argument. Shame on them.

Washington Watchis a weekly column written by AAI President James Zogby, author ofArab Voices: What They Are Saying to Us, and Why it Matters, a book that brings into stark relief the myths, assumptions, and biases that hold us back from understanding the people of the Arab world.