The Elite Sense of Entitlement

Like many first-tier airlines, Delta has clubs at airports where members can find a quiet place to plug in their laptops and get free wi-fi, a safe and convenient place to stash their luggage while waiting for their flights, and a comfortable place to rest and get drinks and snacks. It was nice: my wife and I used it a couple of times when she worked for a company that had memberships for their execs.

Recently the airline has discounted the cost of entry through various promotions. Normally it costs $450/year or $50/day to gain entry, but Delta has recently made it cheaper to visit  the exclusive lounge by making half-off and $89 five-visit passes available on Groupon.

This has not gone over well with many of Delta's most-frequent fliers:

"The cheaper they make it for somebody to go in, the more it's like the regular concourse," said Rick King, a technology executive at Thomson Reuters. "If it's like the regular concourse, the benefits for me go down." 

King, who gets in the lounges free with his Diamond Medallion status, worries that more visitors could make it harder to grab seats with his colleagues before his flights. Some fliers have complained that it's already too packed during peak flying times, with passengers having to wait in line for orange juice in the morning. 

"It's like a Greyhound Bus depot. Way too crowded," said Edward Bertsch, a Minnesota IT security consultant. "The club to a certain extent should be a club. It shouldn't be a profit center for the rest of Delta."

Why is Delta doing this?

[The airline] said the expansion into Groupon aims to attract the website's loyal clientele of younger female shoppers. Delta said 54 percent of the Groupon buyers were women and 70 percent were ages 26 to 50.

Like my wife, the majority of the mostly older, mostly male execs in the club probably have their memberships paid for by their employers. The majority of the Groupon customers are probably paying for these one-off memberships with their own money. Why are old men on the corporate dole more deserving of a nice quiet place to wait for their flight than young women who pay their own way?

Airlines are having a tough time of it, charging extra for checking bags, extra carry-on luggage and seat assignments away from the lavatories, ditching food service in coach, and so on. Yet these pampered execs don't think the airline should try to make money from club rooms that stand empty most of the day.

Conservatives have long criticized "liberal elites" for being snobbish and disconnected from the concerns of real Americans. But corporate elites are even richer, more snobbish, and more disconnected from the realities of every-day life. When they fly they go business class, with wide seats, ample leg room and sometimes even beds. They board first, get special check-in lines with no invasive TSA security checks, have private lounges, and get fed decent food. Yes, it costs more. But they're not actually paying for it, their companies are. And since the companies deduct travel from their taxes as a business expense, the rest of us are really paying for all these fabulous perqs.

Now that their cushy private airport hangouts are being forcibly stripped from them by penny-pinching airlines, the trials and tribulations of dealing with the unwashed masses are just too much for these high-flying execs. But the airlines will be sorry: these titans of industry won't take this lying down. They'll go back to flying their own private corporate jets to avoid waiting in line for their orange juice.