Lounge was awful yesterday morning 7am. As we arrived the queue to get in was almost up to the SATS lounge entrance and several passengers had taken to sitting/lying on the floor here. As we got nearer a very angry passenger came out of the lounge and told the queue “don’t bother waiting, there’s nowhere to sit in there”. We did bother waiting but it really wasn’t worth it. Couldn’t find two seats together, many of the seats had people lying across them, others were sitting on the floor. Then I queued for over 15 minutes for a “breakfast set”. The wait was because they constantly ran out of items which seemed to take an age to be replaced and held the whole queue up. Self serve drink stations were also running out. Staff seemed very stressed and were just not coping; it felt almost like it was a total surprise to them that they were busy, and the atmosphere felt one of stress and bad temper all round. Obviously it’s not the fault of the staff, who were taking a lot of flack from angry passengers, but management really need to speed up the reopening plans for other lounges and ease the pressure here. The whole experience had no premium feel about it; in fact we’d probably have had a more premium experience if they’d just given us a voucher for Burger King instead.
On the bright side our flight to London was among the best I’ve ever taken.