Now Airport Lounges, Too? Why Southwest Is Slowly Becoming Just Like Every Other U.S. Airline

For most of its history, Southwest Airlines was little interested in the trappings of premium air travel. Everyone sat in the same cabin, passengers picked their seats after boarding, two checked bags were free, and there was no private lounge waiting on the other side of security.

That version of Southwest is a thing of the past. On September 2, the airline added another once-unlikely perk to its growing list of once-unlikely perks: Southwest announced it will open its first airport lounges in late 2027, beginning with Austin, Baltimore, Honolulu, and Nashville, and at least seven more locations to follow.

The move comes after Southwest spent the past several years adopting many of the features it once purposely lacked, from assigned seating and extra-legroom seats to checked-bag fees and more premium credit-card benefits. Once that happened, says Gary Leff, founder of frequent flier website View from the Wing, Southwest found itself in an awkward position.

“Southwest all of a sudden was just like all the other airlines—but offering a worse product,” Leff says. “They had barely functional Wi-Fi, no seat-back entertainment screens, no first class, no lounges. So they were ‘the same but less than.’”

Airport lounges are one way Southwest plans to close that gap.

What Southwest’s first lounges will be like—and where to find them

Southwest is developing the lounges with Chase, its cobranded credit-card partner of roughly 30 years and the company behind the rapidly expanding Chase Sapphire Lounge network.

The airline hasn’t released renderings, menus, or amenities yet, but says the lounges will draw inspiration from the communities they serve, with sophisticated design, locally inspired food and beverages, and places to relax, work, and recharge.

And these won’t be tiny rooms tucked into spare corners of terminals.

At Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI), one of Southwest’s most important East Coast hubs, plans call for a lounge of roughly 33,000 square feet, the largest of the first four.

Photo by Charlie Schroeder/Unsplash

The lounge at Nashville International Airport (BNA) will be nearly as large, at about 30,200 square feet. It will be situated after security on the mezzanine overlooking the airport’s central BNA Marketplace, a prominent location in an airport where Southwest is the dominant carrier.

At Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (AUS), Southwest is planning to open a roughly 19,500-square-foot lounge on the third level of the Barbara Jordan Terminal, with entry access near Gate 22. Southwest is already Austin’s largest airline (accounting for roughly 42 percent of all passengers), and the city has become an increasingly competitive market for carriers chasing both business travelers and higher-spending leisure passengers.

Honolulu’s Daniel K. Inouye International Airport (HNL) lounge will have a very different setting. Southwest is converting roughly 12,000 square feet of the former Garden Conference Center in Terminal 2, near the airport’s open-air cultural gardens.

Exactly who will be allowed inside is also still taking shape. Chase plans to introduce a new premium Southwest Rapid Rewards credit card in 2027, and cardholders will receive lounge access. Southwest hasn’t yet announced the card’s annual fee, guest rules, or whether elite status, certain fare classes, lounge memberships, or day passes will provide other ways in.

Why is Southwest opening lounges now?

For travelers who remember the old Southwest, the entire idea of lounges can feel a little contradictory. But Leff argues that the change is part of a much longer transformation in how Southwest competes for passengers.

For years, the carrier did not sell through the online travel agencies such as Expedia and Kayak and flight-search tools like Google Flights that many travelers use to comparison shop.

“If you lived in Dallas or Chicago you knew to check Southwest’s website for flights,” Leff says. “But if you lived in a smaller city they served, you probably didn’t.”

That limited Southwest’s ability to reach travelers who weren’t already familiar with the airline. But expanding onto online booking and comparison sites (Southwest became searchable on Google Flights in 2024) presented another problem: Southwest historically included perks such as free checked bags into its fares, while competitors often advertised cheaper base fares and charged separately for extras.

“They couldn’t just add themselves to Expedia,” Leff says. “They would look more expensive than competitors—who sold basic economy fares without advance seat assignments, checked bags, et cetera. Southwest bundled everything into the fare.”

That dynamic helped push Southwest toward the same unbundled model used by much of the rest of the industry. The airline began charging most of its passengers for checked bags in 2025, and in January 2026 it replaced its decades-old polarizing open-seating system with assigned seats, including Preferred and Extra Legroom options.

Leff says there was another problem brewing at the same time: Passengers increasingly wanted products Southwest simply didn’t sell.

“Passengers have increasingly been willing to spend more for a better experience,” he says. “That’s gradually been a growing trend for over a decade. And Southwest didn’t have anything to offer those passengers.”

Anna Brown, a travel expert at flight-deal service Going, says Going’s 2026 State of Travel report, based on survey responses from 7,008 Going members queried in 2025, shows that comfort is becoming a bigger factor in how people choose flights. The share of respondents who cited comfort as a deciding factor of choosing what cabin to sit in when booking flights rose from 19 percent to 21 percent year over year, while premium economy jumped from 16 percent to 20 percent, making it the fastest-growing cabin (of seats actually booked) in Going’s survey.

“Budget carriers are chasing that same shift, adding roomier seats and loyalty perks because margins are thin,” Brown says.

Southwest has increasingly done just that, first with extra-legroom seating and more tiered perks, and now with something it has never offered before: a place for its higher-spending and more loyal customers to escape the gate entirely. The forthcoming lounges are, in many ways, the clearest expression yet of Southwest’s move upmarket.

Airport lounges have become a big business

There’s also a financial reason lounges have become so important to airlines: They help sell premium credit cards.

“Lounges are a key element in attracting premium credit card spend,” Leff says. “That’s high-dollar, high-margin revenue for the airline.”

Courtesy of Chase

Southwest is developing the new lounge network alongside Chase and plans to launch a new premium Rapid Rewards card with lounge access in 2027. Tony Roach, Southwest’s executive vice president and chief customer and brand officer, called the lounges a “strategic investment in Rapid Rewards” in a press release.

Leff also sees significance in where some of the first lounges are opening.

“A major reason Southwest added Hawai‘i in the first place was to attract credit card customers,” he says. “Card spend and points needed to take passengers where they wanted to go. And it’s no coincidence then that Honolulu will be among Southwest’s first lounges.”

Austin is another especially competitive market. Southwest has a major presence there, while Delta has been expanding in the city as it pursues more premium customers.

For Brown, Southwest’s move upmarket is part of a broader shift among lower-cost airlines. Spirit’s bankruptcy underscores the pressure on the bare-bones model, while carriers across the segment (including Southwest and JetBlue) are increasingly looking for ways to earn more from travelers willing to pay for extra comfort and perks.

Going’s survey found that 44 percent of travelers were willing to book a budget carrier, down from 50 percent a year earlier, Brown says.

“The result is a K-shaped split: premium is thriving, and the bare-bones end of the market is shrinking,” she says.

That doesn’t mean cheap airfare is disappearing, Brown cautions. Travelers may simply need to be less attached to finding it from one particular airline.

Ultimately, says Leff, the result is that “Southwest Airlines is becoming just like everyone else. They probably had little choice, because they needed to reach more passengers and needed their fares to look competitive. They’d likely outgrown the opportunities with their earlier model. And consumer tastes have changed.”