Originally Posted by
San Gottardo
True only as long as you keep the lounge capacity fixed. The CCR experience is poor, but that's only because it is too small. The AF Premiere lounge experience would indeed become much poorer, but only because it is too small for a larger number of pax. The Lufthansa FCL/HON lounges on the other hand don't have that issue (although Munich sometimes feels that way), simply they are much larger and designed to keep a high level of quality even for larger number of pax.
So the issue is not a general one where opening F lounge access to top status card holders will necessarily impact the quality of the lounge. The Lufthansa experience belies that rule. The issue is that current CCR/Premiere lounges in LHR and CDG are too small to accomodate more pax.
I don't really agree and this was not what I meant. I think the CCR is poor compared to the P lounge not because of the crowding (although it certainly does not help) but because the quality of everything is lower. The F terminal is much nicer than CCR but in my personal opinion also of a less refined quality than the P lounge.
So my point was not that new guesting would bring in crowding, but that AF simply would not want to/be able to sustain the cost of treating the new super elite flyers to the lovely amenities of the P lounge and P experience as they stand.
I also mention both because the logistics of the experience and the lounge are twinned: F terminal is a single terminal, T5 is a single terminal. For CDG however, this is not the same and with current organisation, new new "P lounge card holders" or whatever they would be called would not physically have access to the lounge unless they have a flight departing from 2E K gates. Great for your average London-based customer of course [
] but pretty bad for most others and very random! So you'd need to provide the new people with the full P experience including transfers to/from the P lounge, which again is costly. So my guess is that to absorb all that extra cost, AF would dummy down the P lounge experience: maybe make the food less nice, reduce the length of the spa treatments, perhaps only serve full meals at lunch/dinner time and only leave the buffet section in other periods, etc. This is what would make the experience less good.