Originally Posted by
J.Edward
At the FFG event last year at IAD I had a chance to talk with Omar, the station manager for IAD.
He mentioned the IAD PL lounge was new construction BUT was being built to accommodate the eventual rebuild of C/D. That is to say, when they do eventually tear down the "temporary" C/D complex (hallelujah!) they will NOT need to demo the new PL lounge as it was built to work with the proposed rebuild.
No idea if this is still the plan but putting it out there FWIW.
Hard to imagine how that would work. The new construction area with the Polaris Lounge is shown (somewhere...don't recall where right now) as right across from the C-17 lounge area where there are now shops. The new C/D terminal will be about 500 feet south where the train station is already. The Polaris Lounge would therefore be in an isolated island in the middle of the taxiway. Maybe he meant they could move the interior fixtures.
While I'd like to get the Polaris Lounge ASAP, it doesn't bode well for a new C/D terminal for many years to come. They'll just keep patching the warts on the current terminal. Ironically, for the trips where we'd like most to start in a new lounge, United has been offering much better J capacity on *A partners, so we frequently start our journey in terminal B.
While a previous poster thinks the LH and TK lounges are inferior to Polaris Lounges (totally agree), they are vastly superior to the United Lounges at IAD. And that's what United is providing for at least the next year or two (or three, or four, …).