Originally Posted by
samuelo
For my faults/stupidity, I am still loyal to CX Marco Polo. As someone who pays for premium travel on CX I guess it's asking too much to have a lounge that's not overcrowded?
At the end of the day, given the unattrctiveness of the Marco Polo Club, CX elites are at least paying $ to CX and hardly going to be credit for regular travel on other airlines. The least they deserve is lounge access. However, a AA EXP or Enrich Gold Member is not contributing much to CX apart from the $30 fee. Given how cr*ppy the lounges are for AA or MH is a CX MPC member ever going to use their lounges if given any choice? Of course not. So it's just one way traffic from AA etc (excl. QF and maybe BA) to CX lounges. Let CX put them all in a special Oneworld elite lounge which is still probably better than anything they are used to with their own carriers.
PS - you're right on SQ KF Gold Lounge and should have made clear it's the concept of separation I was trying to get at and not asking for wholesale copy and paste
PPS - Rabble bad choice of words. Changed. I don't think I'm better than anyone but as a CX D I do think I deserve to be treated better than other OWE by CX.
An AA EXP who is flying on paid CX Y/J/F is contributing to CX for their distinct lounge visit on their ticket as much as a CX Diamond flying in Y/J/F, no?
AA and MH have a very small number of flights out of HKG compared to CX (BA/JL as well, QF has their own lounges), so you would have to think the number of OWE/OWS pax in Y that are not CX elites is fairly small. I suggest the real way to reduce J lounge crowding would be eliminating J lounge access when not in the J cabin, and having a separate Y lounge for elites, similar to what SQ does.
Alternately, you could do what LH does and have J lounges, *A Lounges which handle Senators, *A Golds and *A FC pax outside of LH Group, and F lounges that are LH Group HON and F only. It's a bit curious to give a paid longhaul no status LH/LX J pax a worse lounge than a *A Gold in Y, but it does keep the F lounges very serene. Both the J and *A Gold lounges are pretty jammed though.
I suspect that a lounge access policy where the home airline's elites get into a lounge
regardless of cabin of travel is MORE likely to jam a lounge than guest airline elites or guest airline premium pax. I mean, really, CX is going to have the most elites in HKG, no? So the biggest factors jamming lounges is going to be:
-CX OWS/OWE getting into a lounge based on status, not cabin of travel
-CX regional J getting access to a lounge (imagine if there were designated longhaul lounges and shorthaul lounges, or if CX cut back lounge access for shorthaul to something similar to what the USA airlines do; no access unless it's a long transborder flight outside of North America.)
AA has two flights a day out of HKG... that means their F pax are adding
at most a whopping 16 people in Wing/Pier F each day. Yeah, they're adding some EXPs in AA J/Y as well, but you fix that if you have a "cabin of service" lounge policy.
Also, given
QR's lounge access rules and
BA Concorde Room I suppose you could do a "CX F only and high spend Diamond" lounge similar to SQ's
The Private Room.