I’d like to bring your attention to mapping of the lounges (usually in airports, but can be anywhere). There is already de-facto used tag Tag:amenity=lounge - OpenStreetMap Wiki, so I’d like to get the clear status de-jure and promote the mapping of the lounges across the community.
Lounge is a comfortable area, typically located in a transport hub (airport or train station). Usually it also provides some extra amenities such as food, showers, toilets, internet connection.
Seems like the original proposal was abandoned, however it is actually used by mappers (e.g. 1). So I decided to revive the process, cleaned up and clarified existing wiki page and put some definitions into the new proposal. I encourage everyone to review the proposal and share your thoughts, suggestions, and any relevant experiences. Constructive feedback on the following aspects would be particularly valuable:
Possible improvements or adjustments
I’m not sure about the rendering part, should I keep it or remove completely?
I’d recommend a more specific tag. There are way too many restaurant / bar like locations that call themselves “lounge”. This will lead to confusion and possibly mistagging.
Indeed, also there is Tag:amenity=hookah_lounge - OpenStreetMap Wiki. Not to mention amenity=lounger. However in the context of amenities lounge doesn’t really have any other meaning, even if one just googles “lounge” without anything, there will be “Star Alliance lounge finder”, Lufthansa lounges and links to Wikipedia in the first page. So I don’t think there is any confusion here tbh, “lounge” is the name how one can find these place in real world (also signs in the airports use either particular lounge name or just “lounge” or sometimes “business lounge”). amenity=lounge is already used across the globe exclusively for the described purpose.
As described in the proposal, I expect that amenity=lounge implies membership or fee (or both), and none of those tags would be common for bars or restaurants so this can be added to some kind of preset for mappers to reduce chance of mistagging.
True, this need for an established tag does come up most frequently for traveler’s lounges, which can provide a lot of services besides couches. Hotel and restaurant lounges are a form of indoor micromapping, so a separate tag might be called for – or even just a secondary lounge=yes on the main POI. Like hookah lounges, gaming lounges and piano bars can be standalone POIs; they don’t have very much in common with airport lounges.
I was the one who created that Wiki page earlier this year to document the tag. At the time I went through all objects tagged amenity=lounge (less than 100 then) to find out how the tag had been used and to make sure the page I was writing accurately described how the tag is actually used. I would say that at the time, about 90% of objects with the tag matched the description I put in the wiki page. For the rest, I left notes or changeset comments, and many of them have been retagged since. (They were usually obvious mistaggings e.g. the mapper meant amenity=lounger or amenity=hookah_lounge).
So overall I would say the tag is now used very consistently for a specific type of facility, but I’m not opposed to changing it if people think another tag is clearer.
Author of the 2018 proposal here, thanks for reviving this (and to @osmuser63783 for doing a proper wiki page).
At the time, some of the pushback was on the key value (same as above), and some due to the ambiguous nature of the proposal (I wanted to cover all types of hospitality lounges, including hotels, which incidentally excluded posh-er rooms in eg pubs that could be called the same thing).
I still don’t see an issue with using lounge for this if it’s a documented tag - OSM tags shouldn’t be read literally anyway
I see two problems here - the tags are easy to read in the presets of the editor, but the detailed descriptions are harder to find. And most people don’t read descriptions if the tag already fits nicely to what they intend to tag.
And a second problem arises if someone wants to add a tag for “lounge” bars. What should it be? amenity=lounge_but_the_bar_type? Then we’re back at the first issue - there’s a tag that seems to fit well, but is only for a specific type of “lounge” and another, incomprehensible one that nobody can remember but is the correct one.
I think it would be covered also by this proposal, at least when you think about “lounges” at the airport or trainstations, while “lounges” in dancing clubs and similar not so much:
Partially, at least I have those mentioned already in the proposal text:
I saw some controversy about waiting areas in the proposal, so didn’t really want to go deeper into this direction. Not all waiting areas are lounges for sure, but the ones which have limited access will most probably qualify.
Not all waiting areas are lounges for sure, but the ones which have limited access will most probably qualify.
I think all of the lounges your proposal is aiming at are either waiting rooms or waiting areas, and it’s their primary purpose and nature, additional classifiers like access tagging, lounge=yes (if this something that can be well defined, or maybe declared by the operator?), etc. could be added.
An airport lounge is a really specific thing. It is a POI in its own right, with an operator, opening hours and a web page. It may not be members-only, but all the ones I have been to cost money to access, or they require a frequent flyer status or similar.
We should not mix this up with the waiting room in a dental practice or a government office.
I understand that lounges similar to airport lounges can also exist in ferry terminals or train stations, and that’s why we aren’t going with =airport_lounge. Sure. This has also led to the page in the OSM Wiki for amenity=lounge describing it as “a comfortable waiting area for customers”, which if you think about it is quite broad.
But if that in turn is going to lead people to tag any waiting room as an amenity=lounge, then we should either find a different tag name, or write a better Wiki description, or both.
That’s why I tried to set a clear criteria in the wiki (which many didn’t notice presumably, just stopping reading on “comfortable waiting area”).
What makes a lounge distinct from bar/restaurant/waiting area is:
Limited access. Most of the known lounges limit access to the members of different programs (such as Priority Pass, Every Lounge), so membership=yes/required should be used. Some of the lounges might allow non-members to pay-to-enter (fee=*, consider also adding charge=*). If the lounge does not allow pay-to-enter, access=private+private=members must be used.
And that’s exactly the idea of the proposal, to cover lounges and not “waiting areas”.
I don’t think you can do that, without saying “we won’t define what OSM tags mean at all, just look the words up in a dictionary”.
OSM tag usage has plenty of examples of this, including “false friends” of the same word in different languages (even English and American!), so we absolutely do need to define what we mean in OSM.
Did you mean these chains of club lounges inside hotels? (That appears to be the industry term for them.)
They do seem much more like airport lounges than your typical hotel reception area or foyer. It’s a POI in its own right, alongside the restaurant that the hotel operates in order to maintain its deluxe five-star rating. As with an airport lounge, you have to pay or be a member to get in, and the services are very similar, minus the departure board.
These lounges aren’t located at transportation facilities, but they do serve travelers, so I wonder if it would still fall under the revised amenity=travelers_lounge proposal. If not, I think they could justify a separate amenity=club_lounge tag.
The overall category including both airport lounges and hotel club lounges seems to be called private lounge, but that term might risk confusion with access=private, which rarely applies. It also would describe something like AMG Private Lounge, which might be better described as a club=automobile.
To be clear, not every airport lounge is luxurious. U.S.O. airport lounges are intended for traveling active duty military service members. Unlike typical airport lounges, these are often located before security in donated space, but they are intended to serve arriving and departing passengers in the same manner as luxury lounges. This name-suggestion-index issue tracks these airport lounges as well as the larger U.S.O. community centers on military bases.
By the way, “traveler” is the American English spelling; “traveller” is the British English spelling.