LoungeBuddy

LoungeBuddy solved an information problem before it solved a booking one. Airport lounge access was governed by a tangle of elite status tiers, cabin classes, credit cards and memberships, and what public information existed was fragmented and often wrong. Tyler Dikman, a traveller who had flown close to three million miles, co-founded the company in July 2012 with two others and spent six months on research before writing a business plan — there were no analyst reports on the lounge market, and the analysts who write such reports did not have the numbers either. The product matched a traveller's actual entitlements against the lounges in their airport, added photos, ratings and reviews from a community of travellers, and sold day passes into lounges that had spare capacity. That second half worked because the airline industry had moved to unbundling: a seat is a seat, and everything else — bags, boarding, lounges — is ancillary revenue on perishable inventory, so filling a quiet lounge at the right price is worth something to its operator. Angel investors came first, among them Tyler Willis of Unsupervised, who wrote one of his earliest cheques into it, followed by a seed and a Series A. American Express acquired the company in 2019 after about six years and roughly 30 hires, made lounge booking exclusive to its own card members, and shut the service down entirely on 30 January 2025.