Southwest Airlines is building a lounge in Austin. What kind of lounge it will be remains to be seen, but it looks to be a very large club lounge for passengers in the new concourse that the airport is building based on master lease documents.
I FOIA’d the new Austin airport use and lease agreement signed at the end of 2025. It has Southwest Airlines building out a 40,000 square foot lounge as part of the new concourse development. The lease agreement lists this as a crew lounge. However a lounge of that size does not make sense as a crew lounge exclusively.
- Southwest announced that their Austin crew base will open next month and it will have 335 pilots and 650 flight attendants. It will eventually scale to about 2,000 total employees by mid-2027.
- A base of that size might warrant a 10,000 square foot lounge. They could lean in to even further growth plans, and with a new terminal build and plenty of available space perhaps they’d dedicate 15,000 square feet. Remember most pilots and flight attendants will not be on site at any given time. If they’re at the airport it’s just briefly, except during irregular operations.
- As a sanity check, the FAA estimates a minimum of 500 square feet per peak hour departure for all airline operations. Southwest will ultimately have 18 gates so 10,000 feet is in the ballpark. (Southwest separately has 30,000 square feet of operational space and 6,500 square feet of ticket office and baggage service space.)
We know that Southwest Airlines is building out airport lounges – with the one in Honolulu now official. Dallas Love Field work will also provide for lounge space.
We know that they’re leasing 40,000 square feet of lounge space on the new concourse in Austin, and that’s orders of magnitude more than they need for the stated ‘crew lounge’ purpose.
So it looks like Southwest Airlines will build a premium customer lounge in Austin. Expect access via a new premium credit card from Chase. Southwest declined comment, but didn’t dispute the story.
What is this new PR strategy of leaking-then-backtracking-then-doing, which BILT 2.0 attempted (no, no… those aren’t the new cards… yes, they are, and you’re gonna pay fees for rent, too)… then Hyatt with the Cat 9-10 hoax only (never-mind, same categories, worse rates, huge devaluation)… BofA, Preferred Rewards, now you need a million dollars, no, wait, we’ll postpone that for a while… now, Southwest, I guess. LOL. Buncha jokers.
Aston. One 1️⃣ the worst airports to ever be forced to change planes at. Slimy left wing woken city and airport. Small wonder that the current DEI SWA board and upper management is choosing it. Pathetic yet par forte course with this entire poser bunch who are rumming the airline into the ground.