December 18, 2025
All good things eventually come to an end.
Before heading to the airport, we made time for one last bowl of boat noodles, which felt like the perfect final meal in Bangkok. After checking in, I made my usual rounds through the Star Alliance lounges. Thai Airways has a very nice lounge, but on this trip I thought the Singapore Airlines lounge easily had the better food.
One thing that immediately stood out was seeing a United plane parked at the gate. In all the times I have flown in and out of Bangkok, I had never done it on a U.S. carrier, so that felt unusual in the best possible way.
My flight included a stop in Hong Kong, and after landing I headed to the United Lounge. That lounge will probably always mean something to me, not because of anything especially glamorous, but because it reminds me of how much travel has changed.
In my early travel days, airport lounges felt very different. This was before the internet became part of every spare moment, before laptops were open on every table, and before everyone disappeared into a cell phone screen. Lounges were places where people actually talked to one another. You would ask someone where they were headed, whether they had been there before, and what they recommended. Stories were exchanged, advice was shared, and for a brief moment there was a sense of community among travelers passing through the same space.
One of my early jobs involved almost nonstop travel, so that road-warrior atmosphere became part of how I thought about airports and lounges. Later, I had jobs that required no travel at all, and I remember one of my first trips after that included a stop in Hong Kong with lounge access. I was genuinely excited, expecting to step back into that familiar world.
Instead, I walked into a room full of people staring at laptops and phones.
That was the moment it really hit me: an era had ended. Technology had transformed lounges from places of conversation into places of isolation. Everyone was still together physically, but in another sense they were somewhere else entirely. I remember feeling oddly disappointed. What I had imagined as a return to that old road-warrior experience turned out to be something very different.
Of course, technology has made travel easier in countless ways, and I am not pretending the old days were better in every respect. But there was something undeniably human about those pre-connected travel moments. For a brief time, lounges were not just places to wait for a flight — they were places where strangers compared notes, swapped stories, and made the in-between part of travel feel like part of the adventure.
Well at any rate – this adventure is coming to an end and I am homeward bound! I found myself thinking that it was nice to see a US based airline parked at my gate.
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