Category Archives for Lounges.
With plenty of time, I went straight to the D terminal which has the best lounges. My first stop was the American Express Centurion lounge across from gate D12. I saw a line to get in.
According to a manager at Virgin Atlantic’s Clubhouse at London Heathrow airport, people are trying to sneak in “all the time.” One recently fellow “ran in and locked himself in the toilet.”
JetBlue crewmembers have been told that the airline will open club lounges at New York JFK and Boston. They’re currently expected to be called Mosaic Clubs.
Chase’s Washington Dulles airport lounge is now open. It’s been redesigned as a Chase Sapphire Lounge, in the old Etihad Airways lounge space, and still hosts Etihad premium passengers for their once daily flight as well.
The Washington Metropolitan Airports Authority is saying both will open in the second quarter of this year.
The best airport lounge in the world is probably the Air France La Premiere lounge at Paris Charles de Gaulle. It has true gourmet dining, a spa, and a car service to take you to and from the plane. However, almost nobody can use this. You actually need to be an Air France first class passenger. They only make one award seat available per flight, and you have to be a Flying Blue Platinum member to book it.
However there are many great lounges that most of us have real world access to. These are my favorites.
Airline passengers will show up earlier, and stay longer (and eat more) at airport lounges than you expect when there’s a great lounge option at no added cost. And that’s true even when you expect that they’ll show up earlier, stay longer, and eat more.
So even as these lounges have expanded, and Capital One and Chase have both gotten into the airport lounge game, there’s just not enough space for the passengers who want to use these lounges.
It’s actually coach passengers with access to Delta Sky Clubs that are likely to see the greatest benefit, because those lounges are generally attractive facilities with good food and beverage options. What those passengers need most is for existing lounges to be a quiet respite from the terminal. And these Delta One lounges will go a long way towards making that happen.
The oneworld alliance has opened up its first ‘alliance lounge’ at Seoul Incheon airport. There’s been a tremendous amount of fanfare for this week and a half old space. But there are teething pains, because the lounge is improperly denying access to customers with eligible oneworld status, even who are flying business class.
The Chase Sapphire Lounge at New York LaGuardia airport only just opened on Tuesday. Usually it takes awhile for new lounges to get crowded because word of mouth has to spread that the lounge even exists. This one is 22,000 square feet – twice the size of the nearby American Express Centurion lounge. And the existence of both in the same terminal should help spread out the crowding.
And yet there’s already queueing to get into this new Chase lounge!
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
