While they've become a lot more popular as of late airport lounges can be a great oasis of calm to escape the chaos of airports.

There are 3 general types of lounges: Airline, Credit Card and private lounges. In this week's tip I'll discuss the airline owned lounges:

These are lounges owned by the airlines themselves. In the US 4 airlines operate lounges: Alaska, American, Delta and United.  There are generally two ways to access these lounges (there are more but I'll keep it simple here). All four of these offered paid memberships on an annual subscription basis for around $500 per year. This gets you unlimited access to these lounges whenever you're flying their airline.

The second access option is when flying International business class (or Domestic first for Alaska airlines). While these are generally not the nicest lounges in the airport one advantage of these lounges (with the exception of Alaska) is they can help you rebooking or other flight issues without having to stand in the customer service lines or calling in.

Alaska and American have a reciprocity agreement where members can use the other's lounges in most cases.

Delta has an agreement with Amex where you can use the Delta lounge when flying on Delta and you carry an Amex Platinum card (more on that next week).

Finally, all four of these airlines are part of global alliances (more on that in a future post). If you're traveling in business class abroad you can use the partner lounges for each of these airlines.

American and United have special lounges in their hub locations for International business class passengers that feature free alcohol, better food, showers, etc. Otherwise the general lounges will offer basic alcohol and snacks

The airline lounges can be helpful on layovers and for a break from the airport, but can be expensive to join. Delta is finally adding improved lounges in LA and NYC soon.