One of the most frequent question I get is about airport lounges, and whether there’s a good, comprehensive resource to look up which lounges will be available at an airport – especially which ones are accessible whether you have an airline club membership, a premium credit card, elite status or a Priority Pass membership.
There’s a new, free resource that does just this exactly: ThisLounge.com.
This Lounge is a searchable resource of airport lounges – showing what lounge are available at each airport and in each terminal, how to access them, and what to expect there – often with a quick synopsis as well as links to reviews with photos.
Cathay Pacific, The Pier First Class Lounge, Hong Kong
They say This Lounge is about advice, and offering enough context so you can decide which lounge to visit. But I think the play really is just as much or more learning what lounges are available to you with different access methods at your disposal wherever you’ll be going. There’s a proven market for this in LoungeBuddy, which American Express acquired but is now shutting down.
Chelsea Lounge, New York JFK
According to co-founder Kevin Song, a former cybersecurity manager at Hyatt and speaker at numerous miles and points conferences like Frequent Traveler University and the Chicago Seminars,
We built this platform because we saw a need – there was no good place to go to see how lounges actually are and to see your options. While other sites focus on access, we’re building this for frequent fliers who already know generally what lounges they might have access to – those who want to know which one is the best one to go to.
Qantas First Class Lounge LAX
Users can provide feedback on their lounge experiences, provide updates for the team to stay current with its data, and track the lounges they’ve visited as well. These are all nice features, but the core is the strong, searchable database of lounges by airport.
Chase Sapphire & Etihad Lounge, Washington Dulles
There’s still work to do on This Lounge, I think. They could use links to more reviews that are out there, even known good reviews. And they don’t list access methods for every lounge they cover. For instance, a good test case for me is The Club at Blue Grass at the Lexington, Kentucky airport.
They show the lounge – which is great! – but don’t have the information that access is actually available to members of United, Delta, and American clubs and also to Amex Platinum cardmembers. I notice the same gap for The Passport Club lounge in Savannah.
Passport Club Entrance, Savannah Airport
Nonetheless, This Lounge is the best current LoungeBuddy replacement I’m aware of and will definitely be worth a bookmark.
What this tells me is that airlines have made it way too difficult too figure out lounge access policies.
No app??
I don’t mind the lack of app (the site is pretty fast, better than an app really).
I’m interested in how they will keep this up to date. For example, I don’t see the new Chase lounge in SAN listed (it opened 3 weeks ago), and I don’t see an easy way (without being logged in) to add it.
Great tool! But, They need an app which would serve as a reminder to use it. Am I going to remember that I have this bookmarked 6 months from now?
Awesome! I’m glad to see someone rebuilt LoungeBuddy. Only 2 cents is to make an app
LoungeReview is what the old LoungeBuddy used to be, before Amex bought and effed it. I use the Android app, works great, has user reviews, can purchase access if needed, knows what access you may have by your statuses, credit cards, etc.
It amazes me that so many people are incapable of organizing and using bookmarks. I don’t need yet another app harvesting data, especially when the mobile site is as clean as this one is.
” New Free Tool Will Change How You Travel”
Not yet. The current version is buggy as shit. Not ready for primetime. Put it in the same can as Points.Me
I’ve joined, logged in and I can’t find a way to correct errors. For example, Admirals Club YYZ provides access to ALL pax in Business Class on AA flights departing Toronto. But This Lounge says only Emeralds can enter.
I used loungebuddy back in the day, but since Amex abandoned it, now just use LoungeReview (the app more than the website). Still in beta, I think. But I have found the access rules to be very complete (it applies them to your particular CCs, status, class of flying, etc., which I find to be the most useful thing). Kind of thin on reviews, but I try to leave them when I can, especially when there isn’t a recent one.
Incidentally, I fly through LHR on BA a fair amount and also recommend Loungebird, which tells you how crowded each BA T5 lounge is at that moment.
There’s already a replacement for LoungeBuddy, and it’s much more mature than this web site: the LoungeReview app, available for both iOS and Android.
Always good to see more competition but this isn’t remotely as smart and complete as LoungeBuddy.
@Arthur: Loungebird requires ios 17 and isn’t even available for Android (the phone 80%+ of the world uses).
The site shows the Delta lounge at LAX T2 and that lounge closed at the end of November.
Good, but it’s missing adding airline affiliation.
If they did airline (ex: AA, BA), partners (ex: OneWorld), and level (ex: EP, Emerald) then this would be killer.
Last time I went in the lounge at LEX there was no booze. Sad little place with canned sodas and little bags of chips.
If you want to check it out, join us for the twice-annual Flyertalk Horse & Bourbon DO in April. The races, bourbon distilleries, southern food, and points/miles talk. Our 25th coming up.
Agree with Zebratis. However, I question the judgment of any reviewer who gives a top rating to the LAX Qantas First Class Lounge. Or, in other cases, who indicates that other well-known international first class lounges have a “simple buffet” at best.
Gary, you can’t possibly say with a straight face that this is the best possible LoungeBuddy replacement. Have you done any research?
In no particular order:
– Whoever created this appears to have merely scraped a few well-known data sources a while ago. Their database is woefully incomplete and out of date. Just to give a random example, Paris CDG Terminals 2A-C are closed for the most part but the web site makes no mention of that.
– As a commenter pointed out above, there is no information on what airlines use a specific lounge. Even Priority Pass information is misleading (for example, there are PP lounges that are only accessible at limited hours or when flying specific airlines.)
– There are no photos.
– The “trusted” reviews or whatever they’re called are one-liners and lack any detail, substance, or nuance.
– This appears to be US centric. I live in France, the (very limited) information about credit cards is useless to me.
– Obviously there’s no app. Yes, I suppose you can bookmark the site but that doesn’t help when you’re offline.
A few folks have recommended the LoungeReview app and I wholeheartedly agree with them. It’s by far the best tool out there, and you can sync with TripIt or manually enter your travel plans to find out what lounges you have access to. Plus it’s now available in several languages. And should I mention it’s actually up-to-date?