I have held OneWorld Emerald Status (due to my ExecPlat AA status) for the past 6 consecutive years. A hallmark benefit of Emerald status is that when traveling internationally on a OneWorld flight you get to use the lounge of any OneWorld carrier, provided it is open and not overcrowded.

However, on Monday of this week, I was traveling from ORD-TXL on AirBerlin (which now departs out of Terminal 5 instead of 3), and despite both BA lounges being open and not overcrowded and despite my Emerald status clearly indicated on my AirBerlin boarding pass, I was denied entrance into both lounges. Upon nicely asking to further discuss the matter and explain how Emerald status works, I was escorted out of the BA lounge by a BA lounge by a staffer who was very rude to me and turned away from me mid-conversation. She told be that AirBerlin is an exception to the policy as AirBerlin has not worked out a contract with BA at Ohare, and that I had to use the AirFrance lounge which AirBerlin contracts out (which I went to reluctantly – not as nice as BA).

Now with an hour to kill in a mediocre lounge, I called AA to get clarity on the policy regarding emerald lounge access. The agent and I both read all the fine print together available online, and while there are exclusions such as if a lounge is overcrowded or operated by a third party, nowhere does it list AirBerlin operated flights as an exception to the benefit. Confused as I was, she placed me on hold to call her colleague at an Admirals Club, and after speaking to her, came back on the phone with me to tell me that the policy has changed and that now you only are guaranteed access to the lounge operated by your carrier.

So I presumed this may be a change to the entire program, until I landed in TXL and was allowed into the BA lounge with no problem despite the fact that I was neither arriving or connecting onto a BA flight.

So now I'm royally confused. Has anyone else had such an issue lately? I wonder if this problem is exclusive to oneworld elites traveling AirBerlin out of Ohare now that they've moved their departures to T5? Or any other OneWorld carriers out of T5? I always was able to use the flagship lounge traveling on Airberlin out of T3 and now not even being able to use the BA lounge when traveling internationally on a OneWorld carrier out of T5 is a big downgrade to the benefits of Emerald.