title: Is airport meet & assist poised for growth?
author: Oliver Ranson
contenttype: article
publication: Airline Revenue Economics
published: 2026-02-25T07:30:25+00:00
sourceurl: https://revman.substack.com/p/is-airport-meet-and-assist-poised
word_count: 1081
I arrived at Doha to start my first airline job with Qatar Airways on 1-Sep-2007. No air bridges in those days – a large fleet of buses shunted passengers between plane and terminal. It was a Saturday, about 9pm, and the air was hot and humid. After the humidity hit me and I walked down the stairs, I saw a rep from the airport waving a sign with my name on. I was told to report to the Al Maha arrivals lounge at the terminal. Advertisement: I handed over my passport and the team took it to the immigration authorities, who gave it a blue arrivals stamp. State of Qatar. Doha. Agent 330. Holder Should report Expatriates Affairs Dept. within a month of arrival to Qatar. You can see the stamp on the left in the picture above. The team came back to the lounge, returned my passport and escorted me through to landside. I headed to the Ramada Hotel and next day appeared in Revenue Management on the second floor of Qatar Airways Tower. No Tower 2 or Tower 3 in those days. Arrivals experiences like these are rare today. They were even rarer back in 2007. Doha’s Al Maha Meet & Greet. Marhaba in Dubai. These airports pioneered mass market meet and greet services. The services are affordable for the mass market. A limo from the plane costs 640 Qatari Riyals (£130). The service I enjoyed is priced at 420 Riyals (£85). And the lounge-only service is 325 Riyals (£65.80). You can even use Avios to pay, although the value is poor at between 26p and 37p per Avios. Away from the mass market, it was always possible to get special treatment at London Heathrow. Their By Invitation service is considerably more expensive than Al Maha. The price today is £4,060.21 including VAT. This includes car transfers and special lounges on either departure, arrival or transit. No co-incidence that a Qatar Airways plane and a Heathrow-branded car currently feature on their website for the service. I would argue that the Heathrow by Invitation service is not necessarily over-priced. Immigration at Heathrow is generally a smooth experience for UK passport holders, as well as Americans, Canadians, Europeans, Singaporeans and South Koreans. Other nationalities may suffer long waits. If three passengers have flown into Heathrow and each holds a £5,000 Business Class ticket, so £15,000 total, an extra £4,060 to skip the lines is a big hit but not implausible. In the rest of today’s article I wanted to consider whether or not meet & assist services like Al Maha may be poised for growth. Will we start to see them at many more airports? Will they become a lot more popular? Now read on… I have three benchmarks for airport services that have grown in popularity over the last two decades. Twenty years ago visiting an airport lounge, using a premium check-in desk or accessing fast-track security were a minority business. They came part and parcel with First or Business Class travel. Since most passengers were in Economy, they missed out. These days, all three are much more popular. British Airways launched it’s Bronze status tier in 2011. This card comes with benefits like bonus Avios on flights and free seat selection seven days ahead of travel. For the purpose of this article, the most interesting benefit is access to Business Class check-in counters. My local airport Newcastle like many others sells fast-track security access. Accessing the quieter lanes tomorrow will cost £7, according to their website. In my experience you would be wise to get it early in the morning, but not necessarily later. At Heathrow, fast-track security is bundled with a 1ST Class ticket on the Heathrow Express train to and from Paddington. Airport lounges have perhaps seen the greatest democratisation of all. Collinson, a large non-airline operator of lounges, said that 2025 was a record year for lounge visits. The group’s revenue was up 17% in 2025 and profit rose 18.7% to £290.6 million. Meanwhile, their gross margin remained stable at 16%. Aspire, who operate the lounge in my home airport at Newcastle, have expanded significantly in the last four years. They took over the space which British Airways used to use as a Terraces and now have three distinct spaces: 1. By the window and featuring impressive chairs is exclusively for Emirates long-haul Business Class 2. Slightly further back but still benefiting from the natural light is the space for premium cabin passengers and shiny-card holders on other airlines 3. You turn left at reception to reach the Emirates and premium cabin lounge, but if you turn right there is another space for the Priority Pass members and pay-to-visit customers travelling on Jet2, Squeezy and others. Meanwhile in the rest of the terminal the bars and restaurants remain busy. Geordies love to have a good time. So clearly there has been increased monetisation of paid airport services at check-in, security and in the lounge. This should not be a surprise. Thanks to economic growth the average consumer now has more money than ever to fritter on luxuries like airport priority. Real GDP per capita in the United States only shrank twice in the last 25 years according to the World Bank and the average American consumer is 37.2% better off in real terms than they were in the year 2000, according to Econ Scope, a data provider. Will it be easy for airports to monetise further into meet & assist as consumers become more prosperous? Read on… There are three types of meet & assist: arrivals, departure and transit. All are about privacy and time saving. Arguably an arrivals assistance which helps travellers skip lines at immigration, or at least sit in a comfy chair with access to refreshments while passports are processed, is of broader appeal than departures or transit. For many passengers arriving in the United States there is already a form of meet & assist: Global Entry. But that requires investment of time and money in applications and interviews, plus a significant forward planning element. Al Maha and Marhaba in the Gulf are almost walk-up-and-pay services. There are three challenges that limit how airports can expand meet & assist services beyond their current scale and scope at most sites. First is economies of scale. A lounge needs one or two guardians at reception, a small number in the kitchen and some others to handle the on-going set-up and clear-up of service. Read more