With Las Vegas preparing to re-open, American Express is making a bet on the future of travel and the gaming resort city. They’ve announced this morning that they’re expanding their Las Vegas airport Centurion lounge by approximately 50%.

While The Centurion Lounge at Las Vegas McCarran International Airport (LAS) continues to be closed due to COVID-19 precautions, we recently signed an agreement to expand and redesign the location when full airport operations and activities resume, again ensuring the health and safety of those involved in this work.

As the first-ever Centurion Lounge, the expansion to The Centurion Lounge at LAS will increase its footprint from nearly 9,000 square feet to over 13,400 square feet. To be completed in 2021, the newly designed lounge will feature additional multi-purpose areas, new private telephone rooms, newly designed reception and workspace areas and more for Card Members to enjoy when their travels resume.

Las Vegas Centurion Lounge

More space and less crowding is the true future luxury in travel. Just yesterday United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby declared “airplanes don’t have social distancing.”

However I suspect that even 50% growth won’t be sufficient for my own preferences. If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past 8 years with the buildout of the Centurion lounge network it’s that quality lounges create their own demand, and will be busier than you think even accounting for that they will be busier than you think.

With the Hong Kong airport re-opening to transit passengers I think it’s time to re-open that lounge. US air travel, while still off over 80%, is coming back a bit and we know much more about managing operations while minimizing risk. It seems like many Centurion lounges could begin to re-open, albeit with modified service – servers bringing individual portions rather than everyone serving themselves from a buffet for instance.

It’s good to know though that American Express,

• Sees a future for travel that has greater need for Centurion lounge space than even before
  
• Plans to re-open the Las Vegas lounge prior to completion of these renovations. A spokesperson tells me there will simply be “brief closure periods” during the course of construction work.

American Express has Centurion lounges in Dallas Fort-Worth, Las Vegas, Miami, New York LaGuardia, San Francisco, Seattle, Houston, Philadelphia, Hong Kong, LAX, Phoenix and Charlotte as well as LAX which only opened on March 9.

We’ll see more and bigger lounges, sooner, which is really what I take away as the best news. Centurion lounges have been closed since March 21 but this move more than anything else in the past two months tells me we’ll see them, and at least in some ways better than before.