Tag: Priority Pass Lounges

The Aspire Lounge at Larnaca Airport opened earlier this year and is a remodelled version of the Swissport lounge which served travelers for years. To get to the lounge you need to pass through security, enter the duty free area and take a left. In the hallway behind the duty free area (near a Burger King) you'll find an elevator and stairs up to the first level where the entrance to the lounge is located.

Qatar Airways has very few lounges of its own around the world so, most of the time I fly with the airline, I find myself using 3rd party lounges while I wait for my flight - on this trip and in Pisa things were no different.

Joanna and I found ourselves visiting the No.1 Lounge at Heathrow Terminal 3 on account of two things - we were flying on an airline which with which neither of us has status (Virgin Atlantic) and I have a Priority Pass membership which gives me and at least ten guests complimentary access (I love my Chase Sapphire Reserve card!)

After a fun few days in Kuala Lumpur, during which time I finally got to visit and see inside the Petronas Towers, it was time to head back to Kuala Lumpur International airport to catch my Qatar Airways flight back to Doha. As in most cities you may visit while flying with Qatar Airways, Kuala Lumpur International doesn't have a dedicated Qatar Airways lounge. Here the airline's premium cabin passengers are provided with an invitation to the Plaza Premium lounge upon checking in.

As I mentioned in the introduction, to connect to my Qatar Airways Business Class flight I took a British Airways positioning flight from London Heathrow to Rome where I had quite a few hours to kill (I've reviewed the BA A320 Economy class cabin relatively recently so I'm not going to review it here again) - I spent those hours at the AviaPartner VIP Lounge Le Anfore - a their party lounge used by Qatar Airways for its Business Class passengers. London Heathrow and Paris Charles de Gaulle are the only two European Airports in which Qatar Airways manages its own lounges - in all other European cities the airline uses 3rd party lounges of the kind you normally associate with the Priority Pass and Lounge Key programs. In my experience this one of the weaknesses of Qatar's premium offering.

The Puerta Del Sol lounge is open from 04:30 to 23:00 7 days a week and caters to both SkyTeam and Star Alliance flyers departing from Terminal 3. It's also a Priority Pass lounge so, if you don't have status and you're not traveling in a premium cabin that's another way to get access.

The Hugo Junkers Lounge is on level 2 of the "Pier B" area at Düsseldorf Airport and, as it's a 3rd party lounge (i.e not run by a specific airline or alliance), it acts as Business Class lounge for a variety of carriers across all three major alliances....although Star Alliance is the most underrepresented.

I reviewed the Aspire lounge at Heathrow's Terminal 5 not long after it first opened and my thoughts on the offering weren't exactly very positive. Since then I've had a number of readers ask me about the lounge so I thought that it was only right that, a year down the line, I give the lounge another try.

There are two "The Club" airport lounges at Las Vegas McCarran airport (one in T1 and one in T3) and, rather confusingly, they're both called "The Club At LAS". Joanna and I were traveling to San Francisco on Virgin America so we visited the lounge in Terminal 3. The Club At LAS in Terminal 3 is located across from gate E2 and acts as the airport lounge for British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and Alaska Airlines (amongst others) and is also part of the Priority Pass network of lounges. The lounge is open daily from 8 am until midnight.

With the busy summer season firmly underway British Airways has been reminding staff and agents to enforce lounge access rules to the letter of the law. In a memo posted on the British Airways Speedbird Club site the airline underlines the importance of managing overcrowding in its airport lounges by ensuring that passengers are not allowed to guest more people into the lounge than their status or class of travel allows.