United Airlines’ top lounge exec pulls back the curtain on 5 major updates for 2025
United Airlines wants you to enjoy a premium airport experience, whether you arrive 10 minutes or three hours before your flight.
The Chicago-based airline just opened its second grab-and-go concept dubbed "Club Fly" in Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH).
United is the only U.S. carrier that offers dedicated takeaway lounges that focus on getting you refueled, rehydrated and recaffeinated in just a few minutes.
This concept is popular with some of United's Star Alliance partners, including Air Canada up north and Lufthansa across the pond, but United's take is that some flyers are just passing through its big connecting hubs without time for a longer, more traditional lounge visit.
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"We want to ensure our lounge products complement the way in which our customers need to travel," Alex Dorow, United's head of lounges and premium products, told TPG in an exclusive interview.
The Club Fly in Houston is United's second grab-and-go location, joining the first outpost that opened in Denver (another big connecting hub for United) back in 2022.
But while Club Fly might be the smallest of the lounges under Dorow's purview, there are big updates coming to the United lounge network this year and throughout the rest of the decade.
Here's everything you need to know, as told by Dorow during TPG's exclusive chat.
5 grand openings in 2025
This year, Dorow is thrilled that he has five lounge projects that'll be open for business.
The first, the United Club Fly in Houston, opened Feb. 25.
The biggest opening of the year will happen in Denver, where the airline will unveil its upgraded and significantly expanded B West club. It will be completed "toward the end of the summer" and measure more than 30,000 square feet.
United is also reopening its club in Hong Kong in the next few weeks and will open expansions of the Polaris lounges in Chicago and Newark in time for the peak summer season, Dorow said.
Club Fly is evolving
When United opened the first Club Fly outpost in 2022, the airline "didn't have a playbook," according to Dorow. It had heard feedback from flyers that they wanted grab-and-go options, but it didn't exactly know what the Club Fly locations should look like.
Now that the carrier is on its second Club Fly iteration in Houston, Dorow says United has learned a ton — so much so that the layout of the space is changing.
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In Denver, the barista-staffed coffee bar is off to the side of the space, but United has heard caffeine is a top priority for flyers in a hurry. So, in Houston, "we've moved the idea of coffee front and center into this that enables more of a, let's call it, a full 360-degree walk through the space," Dorow said.
Other enhancements include a change in how food and beverages are sourced and delivered. In Denver, the outpost isn't connected to a kitchen, but in Houston, United built a back-of-house area that allows it to prep certain items for faster restocking.
Furthermore, it'll offer a refined dining menu, "introducing things like fresh-squeezed orange juice. We're also going to be introducing pastries, including warmed pastries. And then we're refining some of our sandwiches and wraps to make them a little bit more unique to the market," Dorow explained.
Dorow wouldn't tease if more Club Fly locations are planned, but he did say that "this was not just a trial; this was a full commitment that we were going to continue to learn from."
More improvements coming to hubs
United's club team is focused on "master planning" the lounges for its key hubs.
Right now, the airline has largely completed this expansion and renovation work in Newark and Denver, and it has more immediate updates planned for Houston, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
Houston will see the largest-ever United Club as part of Houston's Terminal B North project. This space will measure "over 50,000 square feet with north of 600 seats," Dorow said.
This poses a challenge for United, which has never built or designed such a big club. So, where better to test and mock it up than in a massive maintenance hangar?
"We took one of our tech ops warehouses and actually mapped out a full layout of what is going to be the B North United Club in Houston so that we could understand exactly where we needed to place each of these monuments. So your kitchen, your restrooms, your bars, things like that. And we work with experts to heat map it so that we can understand exactly where the pinch points are going to fall," Dorow told TPG.
In addition to IAH, United is planning to open a new United Club in San Francisco International Airport (SFO)'s Terminal 2, where the airline recently added additional gates. "There's also going to be big overhauls of the other existing spaces," Dorow told TPG.
Dulles International Airport (IAD) near D.C. is getting a new concourse called "Concourse E," and United will open a more than 40,000-square-foot club there, too. This construction is expected to wrap up late next year.
Lots of other updates are expected in the coming months, so stay tuned to TPG as the news breaks.
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Polaris lounge expansions are coming along
This year, two of United's splashy club openings include expanded Polaris lounges in Chicago and Newark.
These spaces have been open for years, but they're often overcrowded and not necessarily the relaxing havens they're supposed to be before boarding a $5,000 business-class flight across the pond.
United has learned from the traffic patterns in these spaces and will introduce "dedicated dining rooms" in both lounges.
"You might remember when O'Hare Polaris opened, a la carte dining was a couple of tables next to the bar, and it was something that we were testing and man, that exploded, and we're very happy that our customers have responded the way they did," Dorow explained.
Furthermore, the number of Polaris flyers eligible to visit the lounge has changed over time, as United has added premium-heavy planes like the Boeing 767-300ER in the "high-J" configuration, which has 46 business-class seats.
With so many more eligible flyers, United has been "capitalizing on getting spaces" for expansion at its most crowded premium spaces.
Domestically, only one hub doesn't have a Polaris lounge. That's Denver, and while CEO Scott Kirby has promised that'll change, Dorow still doesn't have an updated timeline to share on when a Polaris lounge will open there.
"That is being worked on right now. We don't have an exact time frame, but I know in the next few months, we'll have a better sense of it," Dorow said.
Membership changes are on the horizon
The carrier that's been most in the news for its lounge network recently has definitely been Delta Air Lines. That's because the airline has made some pretty drastic changes to its Sky Club access policies (while expanding the portfolio to include some pretty amazing spaces).
For its part, United has not recently updated its lounge membership and access policies, but that might be changing soon.
When asked about overcrowding, Dorow said, "we are looking at membership and what membership is going to look like."
He wouldn't spill the beans (yet), but he did tell TPG that "the benefit of being last (among big U.S. airlines) to change memberships is it's giving us a really unique opportunity to see what works well in the market and what doesn't work well. And we want to always put our customers and employees first in the decisions that we are making."
Stay tuned to TPG because it seems like United Club access changes might be on the horizon.
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