These stale-smelling rooms remain strange holdouts in a world growing more hostile to cigarettes.
2 July 2026
By Morgan Meaker – Bloomberg
When promoting his album Racine Carrée, Belgian singer Stromae spoke about the unsettling allure of an airport smoking lounge that inspired some of his lyrics. “It’s the worst room on Earth,” he saidon a French chat show in 2013, without naming the airport. No animals other than humans would voluntarily expose themselves to the equivalent of 100 puffs without lighting a single cigarette, he said. “Even ants don’t want to go in there.”
In the intervening years, hostility to smoking has only grown. Ireland became the first country to ban smoking in the workplace in 2004. Similar restrictions have since spread from American campuses to French beaches. In Indonesia, where smoking rates are among the highest in the world, cigarette advertising has been banned on social media. Today, the frontier in smoking bans is not places but people: In April, the UK Parliament voted to prohibit the sale of tobacco to anyone born after 2008.
And yet airport smoking persists. In these acrid-smelling side rooms, cramped glass cubicles and butt-littered terraces, a shrinking population of smokers still take slow, pensive drags. The atmosphere is generally stoic, often silent. Eye contact is rare.
So far, 89 countries have banned smoking from airports completely, according to the World Health Organization’s most recent data. But as of 2025, indoor smoking rooms — the most contentious variety — are still allowed in more than 100 countries. Typically, they are barren spaces past security, where smokers crowd together beneath whirring ventilation systems.
“These smoking rooms are antiquated relics of the past,” says Brian King, executive vice president for US programs at the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, who worked on a 2012 US government reportthat found secondhand smoke leaks out of these rooms into the rest of the airport. Yet they remain surprisingly common. According to WHO, the European region (which includes the continent of Europe as well as Turkey) has more airport smoking rooms than anywhere else. The Swiss may be banned from smoking at outdoor bus stops in Geneva, but at Zurich Airport, the country’s largest, they can choose from 16 smoking areas — all of them indoors.
For years, airports have pointed to passenger demand as the reason smoking areas still exist. Antismoking groups, however, say these spaces are evidence of the lingering influence of a tobacco industry that has taken a beating elsewhere.
Airports have become places “where the industry is fighting to maintain the social acceptability of smoking,” says Bronson Frick, director of advocacy at antismoking group Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights. “Airport smoking is definitely what I would call tobacco industry infrastructure. Those areas are there to protect smoking, not to protect health.”
Stepping into these boxes of stale, stagnant air evokes an era when secondhand smoke drifted through bars, cinemas and even hospital wards; when nights out ended with the smell of cigarettes buried in your clothes; when the Marlboro Man loomed from billboards above major cities. In many airports, the past two decades of antismoking laws feel as though they never happened. Smoking indoors may seem retro, but airport tobacco advertising creates a sense of stepping even further back in time. In the UK, tobacco billboards were banned in 2002, five years before smoking was barred inside bars and pubs.
European Union restrictions on tobacco advertising have also been in place for decades, but Munich Airport hosts 26 smoking lounges sponsored by Camel, Winston or the heated tobacco brand Ploom. In Athens, an indoor smoking area is drenched in Winston’s blue branding. Romania’s Cluj Airport has two smoking lounges sponsored by Sobranie.
Airports and tobacco companies are reluctant to discuss the exact nature of these relationships. Zurich Airport says the maintenance of its smoking lounges is “coordinated” with a tobacco company, declining to provide further details. Munich Airport describes Japan Tobacco International, which operates the Camel and Winston brands outside the US, as a “contract partner.” JTI says it has approximately 70 smoking and vaping lounges around the world, but it declined to say how many are funded or sponsored by the company “due to competitive reasons.” Philip Morris International Inc. similarly declined to discuss its “commercial arrangements” with airports.
Even unbranded airport smoking areas function as advertisements for cigarettes, according to Robert Jackler, the principal investigator at Stanford Research Into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising, a Stanford University research group. “These are basically billboards,” he says, noting that some indoor smoking rooms have huge illuminated signs, while others have transparent walls that put smokers on display.
In Portugal’s Faro Airport, a small smoking room has floor-to-ceiling glass walls. On a busy Monday afternoon in June, visitors to the restaurant next door have no choice but to pass within inches of a man in an oversized white T-shirt taking deep drags on his cigarette on the other side of the glass. Many passersby will feel bad for the smokers and their addiction, Jackler says. “But young people may go, ‘Hey, that’s kind of cool.’”
There are still nearly 1 billion smokers in the world. The share of the population that smokes may be declining, but the reality is more complicated, says Angela Wu, a senior researcher with Oxford University’s Tobacco Addiction Group. Progress is uneven. The number of British 11- to 17-year-olds who had tried smoking rose to 21% in 2025 from 14% two years earlier, while smoking rates remain above 30% in Indonesia, compared with about 20% in the US. Research also shows that people on lower incomes are less likely to quit smoking.
Airports are places where different smoking cultures can collide. On a recent holiday in Egypt, Wu says she was surprised to see a British family take their children into a smoking room at Hurghada Airport. Smoking lounges are more common — and more socially accepted — in regions like Africa than in the Americas. When Algiers International Airport announced on Facebook that it was building a new smoking cubicle in February, the response was muted. When Detroit Metropolitan Airport proposed a new cigar lounge, the backlash was so fierce that the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids paid for a billboard opposing the idea.
In their defense, airports say they are responding to what travelers want. The Wayne County Airport Authority, which oversees Detroit Metropolitan Airport, said its proposed cigar lounge reflected “interest from the community and local businesses.” During a £100 million ($132 million) upgrade last year, Britain’s Leeds Bradford Airport posted a tongue-in-cheek TikTok video: “Can’t you give us a couple days to be excited before we have to reply to seven million comments asking where you can have a smoke?” Passenger demand was also the reason Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport gave for reopening its smoking booths three years after closing them. A spokesperson for Israel’s airport authority described them as a “public service.”
Mark Walmsley runs a website for reviews of airport smoking rooms around the world — it gets roughly 100,000 visits a month — and says he’s received messages about airports in China reopening smoking facilities. On his site, the only smoking room to earn a perfect 10/10 rating is at an airport in Guinea-Bissau, where a reviewer praised being allowed to smoke both inside the terminal and on the airstrip.
Doctors are baffled that airport smoking continues despite overwhelming evidence that the habit is lethal. “Anomalies like smoking in airport lounges just don’t make any sense,” says Sanjay Agrawal, a special adviser on tobacco with the UK’s Royal College of Physicians, who argues that smokers can rely on nicotine products such as gum or patches while traveling.
Yet airport smoking lounges are still being built. Greenland’s new international terminal in Nuuk, which opened in 2024, includes a large glass-enclosed smoking room outside the main entrance.
And alternative nicotine products don’t necessarily eliminate demand for dedicated places to use them. There are now 100 million vapers worldwide, and that number is rising. “As traditional cigarette branding faces tighter restrictions, the industry has aggressively shifted toward sponsoring vaping lounges,” says Domilyn Villarreiz, smoke-free program manager at the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance. Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport now offers a dedicated lounge for vapes and heated tobacco devices — no cigarettes allowed — sponsored by IQOS, a Philip Morris International brand. On its website, the company lists other airports with IQOS lounges, including Dubai, Istanbul and Rome.
Smoking areas that don’t rely on ventilation systems — and therefore don’t expose other passengers to secondhand smoke — are less contentious. London Heathrow offers visiting smokers a grim outdoor cage tucked away in Terminal 2: a rectangular concrete patch separated from the tarmac by floor-to-ceiling metal grills. Singapore’s Changi Airport takes a different approach, with 32 smoking areas that include outdoor terraces lush with greenery. Dublin Airport is planning to open a new outdoor smoking terrace later this year.
Like any major societal change, the decline of smoking has produced a messy middle. The airport smoking lounge demonstrates that, globally, the transition from cigarettes is still underway. On a Friday night in May, the dingy terrace that serves as a smoking area in Copenhagen Airport is busy with people clustered around giant ashtrays, looking out toward parked planes on the tarmac. The walls are glass, the ceiling a metal grill. Even the Danish air filtering through is not enough to disperse the thick musk of cigarettes.
In June 2011, a trio of researchers from Boston described airports as among the tobacco industry’s “last remaining havens,” arguing “the time has come” to address the rationale behind that. Fifteen years later, the reckoning for airports and their smokers still seems some way off.
(Michael R. Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP, has been a longtime champion of curbing tobacco use.)