Same here.

Scroll down on the Tegel Lounge website to see their list of "partners", including Dragon Pass. Priority Pass is not listed:

https://ber.berlin-airport.de/en/caf...-tegel-t1.html

Flew between LAX (Los Angeles) and NRT (Tokyo) this month. At LAX, PP was useless (I did not feel like sitting in a gaming cafe to eat cheetos or whatever and there were no restaurant benefits). At NRT, there were nearly 20 people in line at the lounge in Terminal 1. I didn't even bother asking how long the wait was.

It's a shame. I feel like PP just gets worse every year, despite their promises of opening their own lounges and what not.

Thanks, I appreciate that. It's a recent deletion from the PP rolls.

I don't see the Star Alliance lounge listed either which surprises me - with the new and much better lounge opened, this one was absolutely dead the last time I passed through. I'd expect the PP income to help supplement the greatly reduced foot traffic, so not sure why it was removed. Still showing up on staralliance.com, so I'm assuming it's still open...

I expect that Paris airport lounges will operate at full capacity during the Olympics, and will not need Priority Pass customers.

Completely agree on that aspect, but there's a good 3 months before there would be any material traffic from the Olympics, probably 4 considering that the lounge is really only important to those leaving Paris.

Goodness, yes. I've never flown into a city at the time it was hosting such a major world event, and I don't think I ever will.

I have a passion for the Tour de France, but fortunately for me, world cycling has nothing like the mass appeal of the Olympics.

I wouldn't be surprised if PP guests were showing up at the new lounge insisting they could access it with PP. I'm sure when informed that only the old lounge was available and that required re-entering the Schengen zone and going through security again people were positively giddy </sarcasm>.

They may have decided the extra revenue wasn't worth it.

Do people just randomly show up at lounges that have never been part of the program and insist on using their PP there??

Just saw reports that the Priority Pass received through Chase Sapphire Reserve will lose the restaurant benefits on July 1, 2024.

https://onemileatatime.com/news/chase-sapphire-reserve-cuts-priority-pass-restaurants/

https://thriftytraveler.com/news/cre...ss-restaurants

Discussion here: https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/chas...erve-ritz.html

It will be interesting to see if Priority Pass reacts. They could end the restaurant feature, or exclude all "Priority Pass Select" memberships, or sell an extra cost add-on billed directly to the member.

My understanding of the Priority Pass program is that lounges get a flat fee per visitor no matter the location or the duration – which makes sense since there is no difference in what the guests pay. The consequence of this is that it will likely be much tougher to run a profitable Priority Pass lounge in a more expensive location, which is why many of the top US airports – LAX, ATL, EWR, ORD, JFK, etc. – see little-to-no PP value; simply put, lounges in busy airports in expensive cities will endure much higher costs related to rent and personnel while still receiving the same fee per visitor as anywhere else. I imagine this is why Priority Pass lounges may be highly successful in smaller airports with less expensive rent or in cities/countries where personnel is cheaper. Pulling in the other direction is of course the fact that there need to be enough travellers – and wealthy-enough travellers – to sustain a lounge as there needs to be a certain quantity of customers to make it viable. However, in a place like LAX there are surely enough wealthy travellers to sustain a lounge but when the lounge only gets something like $20 per visitor, it evidently isn't profitable there.

I don't have any actual insights into the specifics of the agreements between Priority Pass and the lounges that are part of the program but I work at a PP lounge and therefore have some first-hand experience as a host. I work at CPH which is the busiest in Northern Europe and located in an expensive city. As a consequence, both rent and personnel costs will likely be significantly higher than other places in the world. At the lounge I work, we relatively often have customers tell us that we are inferior to the lounges in Billund and Aalborg (CPH sees about 7x and 19x the number of passenger respectively). "Why is it that these lounges in much smaller airports can make it such a nice experience while you are always crowded and your food is boring?!:o" And even as an employee, I agree with them. But there are some pretty obvious reasons as to why:
The rent at those minor airports is likely peanuts compared to the rent at CPH. Additionally, the lounges at those two airports are run by the airports themselves so there may not even be any rent. Also, since the lounges are owned and run by the airport, the owner may see a benefit to running the lounge at a loss to attract more passengers, so they can make it up in airports fees etc. In contrast, the CPH lounges are third-party run and therefore need to be profitable themselves. The other PP lounges at CPH are about the same quality as ours (and generally less busy) so it is not for a lack of competition that the quality is poorer. This may just sound like me trying to justify quality of the place I work but all of this is to drive the point that it evidently is simply not profitable to run a PP airport at large airports in expensive countries: the revenue per visitor is not enough to cover the costs.

What can be done about this? Well, make the PP more expensive. You will lose some customers but that may also help overcrowding. Alternatively, a rival program needs to exist to cater to less price-sensitive customers (Luxury gyms vs Planet Fitness), though FF lounges may generally cover that customer segment and it also doesn't help to get more PP lounges at the big airports. That would need some sort of price differentiation between airports and that seems difficult within the idea of the PP program. Therefore, it feels like a price increase in necessary for Priority Pass to regain its prominence.

Agreed, but Priority Pass is in the business of monetizing surplus lounge capacity, and most lounges which accept Priority Pass exist to serve other clients. Many are airline operated lounges, or contract lounges which host premium class passengers for airlines which choose not to operate their own lounges. The income from Priority Pass is secondary.

While that is true, monetising that surplus capacity still comes at a variable cost and perhaps also an increase in overheads to create said surplus capacity – a total cost which is apparently not covered by the PP revenue in many cases. There is also a possible opportunity cost if admitting PP guests creates overcrowding and thereby reduces exclusivity. It is tough for us to quantify these variables as outsiders but the former PP lounges in the aforementioned airports have evidently come to the conclusion that being part of the Priority Pass program doesn't add up to profitability. I am admittedly not in the know and will happily stand corrected but I can't really see any other logical conclusion.