This piece follows directly from Priority Pass as a Family Travel Operating System. That article explained why Priority Pass stopped being a perk for our family and became infrastructure once teenagers and young adults started traveling independently.

This article covers what happened next.

In mid-2025, a rule-change was announced. Not catastrophically, but in ways that affected how Priority Pass could be used at scale. Free authorized-user access tightened. Unlimited guesting would disappear. What had worked extremely well now required reassessment.

The objective was not to preserve a specific setup. It was to preserve what the system actually did for us under less generous rules.

By early 2025, our household had five active Priority Pass memberships, the majority generated through authorized users on a single U.S. premium card. That structure supported:

Priority Pass worked because it was decentralized. Each person could handle their own airport time without coordinating with anyone else.

Guesting was used when convenient. It was never a primary requirement.

In June 2025, Capital One announced changes to Venture X lounge access effective February 2026. The key change:

Authorized users would no longer receive Priority Pass access for free. Lounge access would cost $125 per authorized user per year.

At that point, there were three broad paths available:

We ruled out paying almost immediately. The fee itself was not unreasonable, but it broke the economics of scaling. More importantly, it introduced the kind of quiet renewal risk that can lead households to lose track of what they are paying for.

One clarification helped. Existing authorized-user Priority Pass accounts do not migrate into ongoing billable accounts. They simply expire. So no surprise charges and no cleanup required.

That allows for the existing system to wind down cleanly without any effort.

At this stage it helped to be explicit about the constraint.

We were not trying to increase lounge usage or minimize annual fees. We were not trying to keep a particular card in place.

The requirement was narrower than that.

We wanted independent Priority Pass access for multiple adult and near-adult family members.

With this constraint, many cards and strategies stopped being relevant.

When Venture X stopped working as an authorized-user Priority Pass engine, the question narrowed quickly.

Was there still a U.S. card that issued Priority Pass memberships to authorized users without charging per-user fees?

In practice, that list was already very short. It came down to one card.

The Chase Ritz-Carlton Credit Card.

At the time, the Ritz card still offered:

The Ritz card is already closed to new applicants, but the upgrade path from the Chase Marriott Boundless card remains available.

That mattered less for us personally. We already held Ritz cards, and a Boundless card. Why I raise this at all is in thinking about others: what does this path represent for others evaluating whether a Ritz-based structure is still achievable?

For households starting now, the Boundless → Ritz path might sound difficult, and dependent on a state of the world in a year’s time that might no longer exist.

However, taking the first step, applying for the Boundless card, does not require assuming that the Ritz card will exist indefinitely, or that its authorized-user Priority Pass rules will remain unchanged.

It requires only one belief: that having the option to upgrade later is better than not having that option at all.

The Boundless card stands on its own. The current increased sign-up bonus of five free night certificates carry real value regardless of what happens next.

If, after a year:

Then upgrading is logical.

If not, value has already been extracted from the signup bonus, but the upgrade path ends there.

This strategy does not require an ongoing commitment.

It is best understood as a one-way option. You can choose whether to exercise it later, based on how rules and priorities evolve.

In late 2025, Chase announced that Ritz lounge guesting rules would tighten in 2026. Unlimited guesting would be replaced with capped access.

For households whose Priority Pass strategy depended on moving large groups through a lounge on a single card, this was a real downgrade. For us, it reduced convenience without removing most of the functionality.

Our setup never depended on unlimited guesting. It depended on multiple memberships. Guesting was secondary.

Under the revised rules:

Operationally, the change is simple: More cards need to be presented at the door.

Teenagers bringing large groups on one card is no longer viable. But that outcome was not central to how we used Priority Pass.

Independent access remains intact.

If we proceed with the Ritz structure, all three adult children will be added as authorized users.

Each will have:

When traveling together, two or three cards may be presented instead of one. That is mildly inconvenient but does not change outcomes.

When traveling separately, nothing changes.

Without access to the Ritz card, there is no longer a clean, zero-cost way to scale Priority Pass across a household using authorized users alone.

Households now choose between tradeoffs:

There’s no one right answer. It will depend on the household’s own set-up and travel requirements.

Priority Pass and issuer behavior continue to evolve.

There are still edge cases worth monitoring:

As in most cases, Priority Pass isn’t usually itself the driver. They are situations where lounge access is a secondary benefit that enhances a broader relationship that already makes sense.

Priority Pass is useful only when it continues to solve a real airport problem.

For our family, it still does. The mechanics are less smooth than before, and a little more attention is required at the door, but that is acceptable.

The system will continue to function once the changes come into place.