On 3 July, Arun Bansal, the CEO of Adani Airport Holdings, made what sounded like a routine product announcement. Passengers, he said, could now access airport lounges directly via Adani Digital—the group’s online platform. No more “middlemen” or “intermediaries”, he highlighted. 

What he didn’t say, but screamed through implication, was a declaration of attack by India’s largest airport operator.

The target: Dreamfolks Services, a publicly traded company that has quietly built a 90% monopoly in the lucrative business of getting Indian credit-card holders into airport lounges. It sits in the middle of a four-way handshake among banks, card networks, lounge operators, and travellers.

Dreamfolks being rewritten out of that equation was explicit a day earlier. Liberatha Peter Kallat, the company’s founder and chairperson, appeared on CNBC TV-18 and accusedCNBC-TV 18‘We tried to be diplomatic’, Dreamfolks CEO lashes out at airport operators Adani Airport and the second-largest airport operator, GMR Airports—without naming them directly—of pressuring banks like ICICI and Axis to abandon aggregators like hers in favour of themselves.

“The pressure,” she claimed, “is to tell the clients that if they do not sign up with them or do business with them directly, they would actually stop their cardholder access to their airports.” 

For a firm that still derives 93% of its revenue—Rs 1,200 crore out of Rs 1,300 crore in FY25—from airport lounges, the implications are existential. 

This wasn’t a sudden ambush, though.

Kallat told The Ken that the pressure began two years ago, in the form of vague signals. “Feelers were coming in,” she said. “But as a business, you work on your risks.”

Last October, the whispers got louder.