Southwest Airlines Lounge Plans: 5 Cities and the Cost

I have spent most of a decade watching airlines quietly strip the good parts out of flying, so forgive the raised eyebrow at the latest plot twist: Southwest — the carrier that built a brand on open seating and bags-fly-free — is building airport lounges. Real ones, with signed leases, filed permits, and a rumored six-hundred-dollar credit card attached.

Here is the calibrated version, because you have probably already read five breathless posts treating this as a done deal. It is not a done deal. But it is not vapor either. Southwest has been signing leases while saying almost nothing on the record, and the paperwork tells a more specific story than the podium does.

Does Southwest Airlines Have Any Airport Lounges Right Now?

No. As of mid-2026, Southwest has never operated a single airport lounge in its 55-year history, which makes it the last major U.S. carrier without a lounge network. Delta, United, American, JetBlue, and Alaska all run clubs. Southwest runs gate areas.

What has changed is behind the scenes. The airline has quietly signed leases for lounge space in at least five cities, and on its July 23, 2026 earnings call, CEO Bob Jordan confirmed for the first time that work is “underway.” That is not the same as a formal launch. There is no opening date, no published price, and no branded product you can buy today. What exists is a paper trail — and the paper trail is unusually detailed.

What Bob Jordan Actually Said (And Didn’t Say)

On Southwest’s Q2 2026 earnings call, on Thursday, July 23, Jordan gave his clearest signal yet. As reported by The Points Guy, he said: “I know I’ve teased the lounges… That’s something, obviously, that there’s work underway.” Then, in the same breath, he pulled it back: “We’re not ready to formally announce that yet.”

Read those two sentences together, because the gap between them is the whole story. “Work underway” is confirmed. Leases are confirmed. Permits are confirmed. A finished, bookable lounge product with a name and a price is not. Most of the specifics we have came not from Southwest but from the lease documents themselves — View From the Wing has been working through signed agreements and FOIA’d airport filings, which is why we know more about the square footage than about the opening dates.

So treat everything below as confirmed real estate, not a confirmed amenity. The rooms are being built. What Southwest will actually put inside them, and who it will let in, is still being teased.

The Five Confirmed Cities: Where the Leases Actually Are

Five airports show up across the leases and permits: Honolulu, Nashville, Austin, Denver, and Dallas Love Field. They sit at wildly different stages — one has an approved lease and a demolition-ready plan, another is six years of construction away from its first wall. Here is where each one actually stands, and, just as important, what each Southwest lounge would be walking into. The competition it faces tells you far more than the marketing will.

Honolulu (HNL) — furthest along

Honolulu is the closest thing to a sure thing. In October 2025, the Hawai’i Department of Transportation approved a direct lease letting Southwest develop a VIP lounge at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport, in Building 342 of Terminal 2 — the former Garden Conference Center, per Hawaii Reward Travel. It is a two-level, 12,241-square-foot space (roughly 9,577 square feet downstairs, 2,664 up), on a five-year lease at $156.14 per square foot, or about $1.91 million a year, with a minimum $20 million improvement commitment. A January 8, 2026 amendment added space and granted a 12-month rent waiver — the kind of concession an airport signs when a tenant is serious and construction is close.

Here is the part that should interest a Southwest flyer: this lounge lands in the same Terminal 2 cluster as the American, Japan Airlines, Korean Air, and Qantas lounges. Southwest would be opening its first lounge ever, directly across from established international flagships. Glance at Honolulu’s existing lounge lineup and you will see it is already a crowded, well-catered neighborhood — a demanding place to make a debut.

Nashville (BNA) — the flagship, “The Oasis”

If Honolulu is the pilot, Nashville is the statement. Permit filings from February 2026 describe “The Oasis,” a 30,000-square-foot lounge on BNA’s central mezzanine with a $53 million fit-out, per Aeronautics Magazine — a build that requires demolishing mezzanine space above the Acme Feed & Seed restaurant.

Why here? Because Nashville is Southwest’s house. The airline accounts for 54% of BNA’s total traffic and 60% of its seat capacity, and it is reportedly Southwest’s most profitable station in the network. A 30,000-square-foot lounge is the kind of thing you build where you already own the airport.

It would not be alone. American’s current 7,000-square-foot Admirals Club is being replaced by a 17,400-square-foot lounge with outdoor terraces in the new Concourse A, targeted to open when that concourse does in July 2028, according to The Points Guy. Delta’s Sky Club near gate B3 was recently renovated to more than 10,000 square feet with seating for nearly 200. Set that against Nashville’s current lounges and the scale registers: “The Oasis,” at 30,000 square feet, would dwarf all of them.

Austin (AUS) — anchor tenant, biggest square footage

Austin is the confusing one, and worth slowing down for. A use-and-lease agreement signed at the end of 2025 — surfaced via FOIA and reported by View From the Wing — names Southwest as the anchor tenant of a new concourse and sets aside 40,000 square feet labeled a “crew lounge.” Analysts called that label overkill: Southwest’s Austin crew base is projected to reach only about 2,000 employees by mid-2027, and you do not need 40,000 square feet to seat crew. The obvious read is that much of that space is meant for passengers.

Separately, a newer building permit under the code name “Project Oasis” points to a nearer-term 20,000-square-foot Southwest lounge with an estimated completion of March 1, 2027, per Aviation A2Z — years ahead of Southwest’s planned move to AUS’s new midfield concourse in the early 2030s. So there may be a smaller, sooner lounge and a larger, later one.

Either would land in a thin market. Austin today has just three airline lounges, all in the Barbara Jordan Terminal — the American Admirals Club, the Delta Sky Club, and a United Club that is temporarily closed — with no Priority Pass or Centurion option, and the Chase Sapphire Terrace shut permanently on March 19, 2025, according to LayoverIndex. For an airport growing this fast, Austin-Bergstrom’s lounge options today are genuinely sparse, which makes Southwest’s footprint here look ambitious rather than redundant.

Denver (DEN) — the “near-term” target

Jordan has publicly named Denver a near-term lounge target. Southwest is DEN’s second-largest carrier and has committed to a lease through 2035 covering 40 gates, including a 16-gate expansion in Concourse C East; the “support space” in that expansion is seen as the likely lounge site, per Aeronautics Magazine.

Denver is also where the ambition meets a wall of incumbents. United alone has nearly 100,000 square feet of United Club space across three clubs — the newest, a 33,000-square-foot, 600-seat, two-story club in Concourse B West, opened July 31, 2025, per United’s own newsroom — plus a Centurion Lounge and a Capital One Lounge, and it is building a seventh club, a United Polaris Lounge between gates A18 and A20. Whatever Southwest fits into “support space” in Concourse C East will open into one of the most lounge-saturated airports in the country. Being second-largest carrier here still means playing catch-up by roughly 100,000 square feet.

Dallas Love Field (DAL) — the home base, but years out

Here is the irony: Southwest’s own headquarters airport has zero lounges today, and it will be the last of the five to get one. Southwest holds 18 of Love Field’s 20 gates — a number capped since the 2006 Wright Amendment Reform Act — and flies roughly 97 to 98% of daily departures. It effectively is the airport.

But Love Field has no room for lounges as currently built. The city’s Love Field expansion program — pegged at more than $1 billion and since detailed at up to $2.54 billion — will push the concourse walls and jet bridges out about 50 feet to create the airport’s first-ever passenger lounges, per View From the Wing. Construction is set to start in 2027 and run about six years, with Southwest expected to fund “the lion’s share.” Be honest with yourself about the timeline: this is the slowest-moving of the five. If you fly Love Field, the most useful thing I can tell you today is where Love Field regulars actually leave the car, because the lounge is a long way off.

What It Will Actually Cost You to Get In

Now the part the airline is teasing hardest and confirming least. Southwest’s lounges are widely expected to be co-branded with Chase and tied to a new premium credit card. Reported target annual fees run from $395 to $650, with some reporting landing at $500 to $600 — well above the $229 fee on today’s top-tier Southwest Rapid Rewards Priority Card, according to View From the Wing. Access may also be supplemented by a Priority Pass membership, at least early on, because the initial lounge footprint is small.

I will say the quiet part out loud, because it is my whole beat: this is not a free perk arriving to make your Southwest flight nicer. It is a premium-card upsell wearing a lounge costume. The lounges are the bait; the annual fee is the business. That is less a criticism than a translation — every U.S. carrier now runs its clubs as a credit-card acquisition engine, and Southwest is simply the last one to the party, walking in with a card that could cost more than double its current top-tier fee.

What To Do Right Now While You Wait

None of this helps you on a delay next Tuesday. So here is the stopgap, and it is the same advice I give everyone without airline status: let the card do the work. A Priority Pass membership from a card like the Chase Sapphire Reserve, Centurion access from the Amex Platinum, or a Capital One Venture X will get you into a lounge at most of the airports on this list today — no Southwest product required. I laid out the full approach in how to get into a lounge without airline status, and none of it depends on Southwest ever opening a door.

If you fly Southwest specifically, note the mismatch. The airline operates out of terminals — Love Field, Austin, Nashville — where the lounge you can actually use today may belong to a different carrier or a card network entirely. Check the room, not the logo.

Why This Is a Bigger Deal Than It Sounds

Step back and the lounges are not really about lounges. They are the clearest sign yet of an identity change. For 55 years Southwest defined itself by what it refused to do: no assigned seats, no bag fees, no premium cabin, no clubs. Under pressure from activist investor Elliott Investment Management, that list has been dismantled almost item by item — assigned and extra-legroom seating, checked-bag fees, and Starlink Wi-Fi have all arrived, and now the lounges complete the set.

The airline that once made a virtue of skipping the frills is building the frills. Whether that reads as progress or as the same slow erosion of “free” I have watched everywhere else depends entirely on how much you liked the old Southwest. But the direction is no longer ambiguous.

Southwest Airport Lounges: Quick Answers

Will Rapid Rewards elite status get me into a Southwest lounge? Nothing has been announced. Based on the reporting so far, access is expected to hinge on the new Chase co-branded premium card rather than on flight-based elite status — a card-first model, like most U.S. lounges now.

Does Southwest have a deal with Priority Pass? Not officially. Reporting suggests Priority Pass access may supplement the card early on, precisely because the initial lounge footprint is so small, but Southwest has confirmed nothing.

When will the first Southwest lounge open? No official dates exist. Honolulu is furthest along with an approved lease, and Austin’s “Project Oasis” permit targets completion around March 2027. Dallas Love Field is the laggard — construction is not slated to start until 2027 and runs about six years.

How much will membership cost? Expect a new premium card in the $395–$650 range (some reporting says $500–$600), compared with $229 for today’s Southwest Rapid Rewards Priority Card.