Arrived at T3 at 3:30am for the 6:55am flight to LHR.
To my surprise 3 check-in agents were already getting things ready and as a result check-in opened at 3:40am (as opposed to the advertised 4am). I was checked in in 2 minutes and through a fairly fast moving FastTrack lane. The person policing the FastTrack lane didn’t believe me that my BA Gold status allowed me to access FastTrack nor that Club Europe was business class. They wanted to see the word business on the boarding pass! This would all be solved is BA just printed FastTrack on the boarding passes. Anyway, he said go ahead but they’ll turn your back, which of course they, being the machine, didn’t.
I got to the Escape lounge just before 4am where there was a queue of about 15 people waiting to for it to open.
It seemed that they were only letting people flying BA or who had pre-booked in and turning people away even at 4am. The lounge had about 75% of seats reserved for pre-books. Even the BA section only had about 6 unreserved seats.
The airport was very busy in general with long queues to get into eateries in the main departure hall.