Lounges
Access is easy to get. Whether a lounge actually earns its keep on a given day is a different question.
I visit a lot of lounges, mostly Admirals Clubs, because they sit along the routes I already fly. Over time I stopped thinking of a lounge visit as a perk and started thinking of it as a decision — is walking in actually worth the time, or would I be better off just sitting near my gate? That question is the whole idea behind Club Check, the recurring series where I evaluate a specific lounge visit on a specific day rather than describing a lounge in the abstract.
The abstract version of a lounge review is easy and mostly useless. Every lounge has decent chairs in a marketing photo taken at 10 a.m. on a slow Tuesday. What actually matters is what the room looks like during a real afternoon bank of departures, when every seat near an outlet is taken and the food setup has been picked over for two hours. That’s the version of the lounge a business traveler actually experiences, and it’s the version I try to write about.
A few things I pay attention to on every visit: whether I can find a seat with a real work surface, not just a lounge chair; whether the Wi-Fi holds up when the room is full; how the noise level compares to just sitting at the gate; whether the food and beverage selection is something you’d actually eat versus something that looks fine in a photo; and — the most important test — whether the visit meaningfully improved a tight-connection day, or whether it just gave me a nicer place to wait around doing the same nothing I’d have done at the gate.
That last point matters more than people give it credit for. A great lounge on a three-hour layover is a genuine upgrade to the day — a quiet corner, real coffee, a chance to knock out email before a client call. The same lounge on a forty-minute connection is often not worth the walk. Club Check tries to be honest about that distinction instead of treating every lounge visit as automatically a win.
This section collects those visits as they happen — specific clubs, specific conditions, specific verdicts — so the pattern across locations and travel banks becomes useful information rather than a single glowing writeup that doesn’t hold up on a bad day.
Practical Tip
Before detouring to a lounge on a short connection, check the walk time back to your gate against your remaining buffer. A lounge visit that costs you your boarding window isn’t a perk — it’s a risk you didn’t need to take.