Delta bars employees without paid tickets from Sky Club lounges as it struggles with long lines and overcrowding

Business Insider ^ | Jan 12, 2023 | Hannah Towey

[where's_the_Outrage?]

Delta employees will be barred from the airline's Sky Club lounges unless they pay for a ticket.

That means flight attendants and pilots will not be permitted access when flying standby for free.

The airline is working to fix long lines and overcrowding at its popular airport lounges.

Delta employees will no longer be able to access the airline's popular Sky Club lounges unless traveling on a paid ticket, the airline told staff in an email sent Thursday.

The controversial changes come as Delta struggles to combat overcrowding in the lounges, first announcing major restrictions on which passengers can buy annual memberships to the clubs back in November while significantly raising yearly fees.

"If you've visited a club recently, you may have seen lines out the door and guests — including our 360 and Diamond Medallion Members — waiting for seats once inside," the email said, according to a screenshot obtained by Insider. "This is not the experience our best customers want to have, nor the one we wish to deliver."

(Line for the @Delta Sky Club at JFK T4 is insane)

[livius]

In all fairness, Japan is a smaller country, a lot of its population is elderly and doesn’t fly much and in any case I think unvaccinated Japanese are not permitted to enter the US. Thus they probably don’t have the international travel density that we have.

Atlanta is a pretty good airport, JFK is horrible, O’Hare is worse, so yes, there are differences between international airports. A lot of these are essentially taxpayer funded, so we should make more demands on them.

[Vigilanteman]

It is a country which is roughly the size of Montana with 40% of the U.S. population, heavilly skewed to the urban side. And, yes, the elderly don't travel much but the young probably travel more than their U.S. counterparts.

The international travel density is not all that dissimilar when one considers there are exactly THREE airports designed for a large volume on international travel; one in the Kansai (Osaka-Kobe) area and two in the Tokyo area, Narita and Haneda. Haneda is also a major domestic hub with two of the three terminals devoted to domestic flights.

The biggest difference, I think, is cultural as Japan has neither many visitors nor local population that feels "special" nor "entitled."