Originally Posted by jpdx

I firmly believe that the IHG lounge pass is overly generous, and that we will start seeing some restrictions soon at more popular hotels -- for instance, lesser "elite lounges" offered for lounge pass holders vs "real club lounges" for paying guests. This is already happening at some Bonvoy hotels for status holders, e.g., Sheraton HK, Sheraton Salzburg, Marriott Nagoya. When you see the threads on the Marriott forum showing pictures of signs placed at front desks "we are pleased to welcome 32 Ambassadors / 47 Titaniums / 53 Platinums checking in today," you can sense that the hotels really have no choice given the elite overload they face.

Of course Marriott Platinum (the lowest status eligible for lounge access) can be had very easily for US-based members via credit cards, and the frequent double night promos they run make it very easy to reach Titanium. I'm Lifetime Titanium so don't need to worry about qualification, but with credit card nights and promos, I'm already past the qualification threshold for Platinum for the year, even though I couldn't even tell you off the top of my head which Marriotts I stayed at this year (couldn't have been more than 10 nights). So I'm very grateful that the IHG lounge pass is NOT available via credit card, but rather requires putting in some effort. To be fair, when timing a status run to coincide with the right promotions, you can probably earn the lounge pass for $1000 at a cheap hotel in SE Asia, which would of course be easy to recoup with a handful of nights at say Regent PQC with its $150/pppn club fee. I dread the day the Chinese internet catches on to this opportunity.

In my experience -- and to my surprise -- lounges at ICs and Regent are NOT AT ALL overrun. This includes stays during "peak season" at Regent PQC (where we were almost alone at the lounge in early January), IC PQC (where the lounge was moderately busy over NYE, while the rest of the hotel was a zoo), IC Osaka (where during fall colors and sakura seasons, no more than half the tables in the lounge were occupied at any time). Add to that several stays at IC Strings, HKGS, Paris, London, and Vienna, which also had lounges that weren't very busy. The only packed lounge I encountered was at IC Robertson Quay, and even that was a far cry from the "pick a time slot" or "we'll put you on the waitlist" schemes found at some Asian Bonvoy properties.

Because I haven't seen lounge overcrowding in my travels, I don't know how pressing an issue it is for hotels. Generally, IC lounges are superior to the competition, so the hotels may be in a pickle as far as watering down offerings goes. I don't think the lounge pass offering in its current form is sustainable, but I'm not sure whether IHG will feel able to cut benefits so quickly after their introduction. I think an obvious change would be to reduce the validity of the lounge pass to a year from selecting the milestone, rather than potentially 24 months. Even more drastic, IHG might issue a certain number of single-use lounge passes at the 40 and 70 night mark (e.g., 5 lounge passes valid for stays up to 7 nights). I'd prefer IHG reeling in the overly generous benefits this way rather than seeing widespread "gaming" of the benefit by offering "lesser" lounges to lounge pass holders.