Originally Posted by
Psowden
I’m in the process of swapping from BAEC to Qatar Privilege club, which means being demoted from group 1 to 9 whilst I pick up status. However, as a gold card holder my understanding is that so long as I’m on a One World flight, in this case BA I can still use the First class lounge ?
Its a very interesting question. Leaving to one side AA and AK who have their own carve outs with respect to lounge access, as an Emerald card holder the general rule is you have access to any member lounge, "
when departing on any flight marketed and operated by any oneworld member airline," on the same day, with the same entitlement as an Emerald member of the the the airline operating the lounge.
(On a strict reading I'd say it excludes access for flights that are marketed by one member, but operated by another, but I'm sure that isn't meant to be the case and my own experience tells me its not.)
The issue you have of course is that when you rock up to the Dragons at the First lounge you wont have your BA Gold number on your boarding pass, so as mentioned above you'll need proof of status to get in. You may have some issue with outstation Dragons who may not have seen this happening before, I was flying MH from Singapore once and hadn't noticed my BA number was missing on the boarding pass and no amount of gold card flashing at the BA lounge could get me in. If you turn up with a boarding pass with the lowest tier on it, they may be confused sufficiently not to let you in.
There is also another issue as foreshadowed above. If you were departing from say SIN on a BA ticket, but a QR FF number with the lowest tier on the boarding pass, and decided to try out the very nice QANTAS First lounge, I believe they scan the BP on entry to charge back to the airline issuing the status, as your BP will have no mention of your BA status, and it wont be in the system, you may again experience a problem.
I suspect it wont be long before we have some real life examples and it may be that there are some BA GFLs out there who have already started chasing status with QR well before the current issues manifested themselves, who can give some input.