Originally Posted by MiamiBeach
I was at the AY lounge in ARN 3 months ago, and they have a separate "Platinum" (AY's Emerald level) section in this lounge which is accesed with a code. This was quite late in the evening with only one BA A319 and one AY EMB-170 left to depart that day. I saw AT LEAST 10 different people go into the Platinum Lounge (and I can't imagine that most of them were BA Golds), so I have to seriously doubt that AY has fewer than 100 Emeralds.
Probably not <100. But there can't be that many of them either as 300000 miles or whatever the limit is really isn't achievable by anyone else but frequent, long haul business class travellers. I know exactly one person.
Everyone else in Finland, including me, who have mainly short haul business trips are actually BA FF:s. I can easily maintain my emerald status with BA gold. (LHR-CAI-LHR once a year in F, 360 points, ka-ching). On AY I probably wouldn't even be able to get their gold card making me a disgraceful ruby basically without any lounge access. I wouldn't even dream of a platinum card with a couple of short haul business trips and an AONE3 a year.
So the Arlanda emerald lounge people are probably 90% BA gold members.
/hv