Next week a British Airways lease for new lounge space at the Miami airport is expected to receive signoff. The lounge will be 12,973 square feet on the Concourse E-Satellite fourth floor.

The agreement is for 10 years, and a 5 year option to renew, with $1.75 million annual base rent plus other charges, and over $22 million in lease payments over the initial term.

Some of you will remember the old British Airways lounge on the D concourse which was open around 1999 through 2007 and that was only half of the size of this lounge. It was closed to accommodation terminal modifications, and so BA used the Club America lounge when they were flying out of the F concourse and the oneworld Premium Lounge in E. Currently that lounge is closed and so passengers have been using American’s lounge on the D concourse even while departing from E.

It’s literally insane that this project won’t even begin for a year, and then is expected to take 30 months. So the lounge won’t even open until mid-2026 if everything happens on schedule which… never happens.

BA had invested in lounge design near gate D21 when they were expecting D1 to be an Airbus A380 gate, but they got pushed over to E because of American Airlines needs. So the airport is giving them a credit of $366,267 for the investment they’d made before being moved.

I haven’t yet found more detail on where the lounge will be located. I would have expected them to simply repurpose the Concourse E Premium Lounge which was used by oneworld airlines including BA, Iberia and American and which has remained closed. However this new lounge will be twice as large as that one was.

(HT: @bags)