Admirals Club members now have access to more partner lounges when traveling
If you’re a member of the Admirals Club, you’ll be pleased by this announcement:
Your Admirals Club membership now extends your lounge access benefits beyond the network of 42 Admirals Club locations and 33 Qantas Club locations. Through our new expanded lounge access program, Admirals Club members now enjoy the ability to visit other lounge locations when traveling through these nine cities.
Members will now be able to access these lounges in the following cities:
Alaska Airlines
City Lounge
• Anchorage, AK Board Room
• Portland, OR Board Room
• Seattle, WA Board Room
Finnair
City Lounge
• Helsinki, Finland Finnair Lounge
Malev
City Lounge
• Budapest, Hungary Malev Lounge
• Budapest, Hungary Millennium Lounge
Kingfisher
City Lounge
• Delhi, India Kingfisher Lounge
Cathay Pacific
City Lounge
• Beijing, China Dragonair and Cathay Pacific Lounge
• Shanghai, China Dragonair and Cathay Pacific Lounge
Japan Airlines
City Lounge
• Frankfurt, Germany Sakura Lounge
If you compare the benefits of the Admirals Club with those of Delta’s Sky Club, you’ll notice that Delta has been far more successful in securing reciprocal agreements with their Sky Team Alliance partners. The obvious difference between the two is that Sky Club members have access to far more lounges. In fact, the Sky Team does a much better job of aligning lounge benefits across the whole alliance.
American and the Admirals Club haven’t been able to get that kind of cooperation from their partners, and other than having access to a few Alaska Airlines lounges and Qantas Club facilities, partner lounge access is fairly limited unless you’re have middle tier or better elite status with a one of the oneworld member airlines.
I’d love to see them expand reciprocal access to more lounges in more airports: Hong Kong and Lima are at the top of my list. Hopefully, we’ll see more of these kinds of announcements in future.
Go here to read the full details.
If you have the new Citi Esecutive Elite Master Card will that give you access to Alaska Airlines lounges and Qantas Club facilities?
@ Jim – From everything I’ve read, the new Citi Executive Elite card includes an Admirals Club membership, and not just Admirals Club access as with the American Express Platinum card.
This info was posted by the official American Airlines representative to a thread over at FlyerTalk:
If someone signs up for the card and they’re already a member of the Admirals Club, American refunds a prorated portion of the Admirals Club annual fee, so I’m pretty sure that the Citi card provides a full membership and that a cardholder should be able to access partner lounges.
Of course, it will also depend upon someone communicating it to the people staffing the front desk at these partner lounges.
Thanks for reading and thanks for the comment!