An American Airlines Flagship Lounge is the premium lounge product at the airline. These facilities are available in New York, Miami, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles and purchasing access will cost you $150.
While that may seem steep, for some it might well be worth it. To get the most bang for your buck, you would want to get to the airport nice and early to maximise your time in the lounge. Hell, I’ve arrived seven hours before a flight before to have both breakfast and lunch in a lounge and I loved it!
What Do You Get In A Flagship Lounge?
Having visited both the Chicago and New York Flagship Lounge, my opinion is they are streets ahead of the Admirals Club lounges. In fact, they are on par with some of the better lounges around the world.
Is Flagship Lounge Access Worth $150?
Regardless of the extensive, fresh and very decent food selection, it is still an airline lounge, and an airline lounge in the United States at that. I find that US lounges always manage to feature beige in the seating somewhere, as well as seats which look ergonomically challenging. Let’s just say you don’t visit a lounge in the states and expect to be wowed by the interior design like you are with a Cathay Pacific lounge.
Overall Thoughts
It is interesting seeing American Airlines sell access to their Flagship Lounge. Airlines are gradually monetising the lounge experience for those without access, so this is perhaps not too surprising.
At $150 it will certainly keep the facilities exclusive as I can’t see people rushing to pay that, especially when they might only arrive two hours before flight. Of course, it must be mentioned that oneworld Sapphire and Emerald frequent flyers who hold status with airlines outside the USA have access to these lounges for free.
What say you? Would you pay $150 for access to the American Airlines Flagship Lounge or not a hope? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.
Like planes? See my “Does anyone remember” series.
Flight reviews your thing? Mine are all indexed here.
Follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Pre-pandemic, I used my DL Amex card to get into the lounge in Atlanta for $39, just to see what it was like. All the cold pasta salad and cookies I could eat, but I still felt my money would have been better spent at a concourse food place and a seat at the gate. $150? That’s my entire food budget for a 4 day trip. I’ll pass. I’m cheap like that…on some things.
It’s definitely steep, but I guess if they were charging $20 the place would be rammed with people wanting to feed on the goodies 🙂
If I have a long layover it might be worth it, but I think it would depend on how I’m feeling on the day. Where the ACs get busy to the point of overcrowding I can see it being possible, but the LAX FL has been far more crowded than the ACs during my last trips (that’s when the bridge to TBIT and the QF First Lounge comes in handy!), and the MIA FL tends to get incredibly loud towards the late-afternoon and evening flight departure banks which diminishes the value to me.
Fair points there. I guess if you have the knowledge of knowing which facilities are busy and when, it gives you a bit more visibility than the average flyer as to whether it’s worth it or not. I’ll be very curious to see how many people they end up buying access, not that I’ll ever know 🙂
If Flagship reopened showers and was the only option for shower access I could imagine a more meaningful subset of customers paying for access.
I imagine the showers will come back in due course. Would people really use them that much though? I wouldn’t factor the shower into my $150, but that’s just me.
Most of the Admirals Clubs have shower access. At some airports the showers are shared between the AC and FL.
Do you have a link showing that it’s good as a day pass? The link in the article says it’s a single visit pass
It was written by another blogger – so that’s what I get for not being careful and rechecking the facts. The AA website clearly says single visit here – https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/clubs/flagship-lounge.jsp – thanks for that, I’ll amend the piece.
Correct. Single visit, single location. NOT system-wide.