AS Lounges in SEA Leaving Priority Pass (9/1/2018)
 

Ouch. What about when they open the new N club, that should give them even more capacity. There are times the clubs are quiet enough they must be making money to fill in the space. I guess they are done with the hassle.

Things were suppose to get better when they opened the new C lounge, but then the lounge opened and it almost seemed things actually got worse as far as the amount of time the "no PP" sign was out. I'm not sure if it's Alaska that's done with the hassle or Priority Pass....what "little" money Alaska was still making with drastically decreased # of PP visitors is going to completely go away while Priority Pass has done a relatively good job at filling in the lounge gaps, especially at SEA and PDX. As a PP person myself, this doesn't really change anything for me since I rarely was able to find an Alaska Lounge without a "no PP" sign. I figured this was coming down the road and I'm almost certain it will eventually apply to all the AS Lounges, not just SEA.

I asked PP via Twitter about the Sept. 1st change regarding the SEA Alaska Lounges and they confirmed it. Due to space constraints, PP members will no longer have access to the Alaska Lounges in SEA. It's interesting that LAX and PDX are not included in this announcement, but I suspect they will follow in the near future.

There are two PP the Clubs at SEA, so it's been kind of overserved for PP.

PDX and LAX do have some other PP options, but do not have The Club locations.

Disappointing, though I'd already been assuming I couldn't get in and tried to be pleasantly surprised when I could -- I guess this eliminates the uncertainty. Since the two Club locations are about as far from the AS side of SEA as you can get, I've emailed PP to ask if they're going to do any sort of Caper's style arrangement for that half of the airport.

It affects me big time because my travel schedule now has me at the AS D lounge when it opens at 4:30am. Since they are empty, PP is welcome and I always get in. Now I will be cut off. Terminal A The Club is just too far and may not even be open then.

I find this to be a good news and hopefully systemwide so people can buy more alaska lounge memberships if they chose. I hope this will elevate their food level as well

Alaska has been promising a much better lounge experience for awhile now. Still, have not seen much except for the introduction of baked cookies instead of boxed cookies .
They have been trying to force frequent travelers to buy memberships for the last few years.. But, Many have given up memberships because of dismal conditions. Wonder if perks given to employees of Microsoft and Amazon include lounge membership?

Really something that makes no sense at all for those that are SFO based and visit/transit SEA a few times a year using Priority Pass. Until Alaska has a lounge at SFO, I just don't see the need to rush and buy an Alaska membership that I'd probably use, at most, a half dozen times a year in Seattle. I should note, as an AA flyer, I did have an Admirals Club membership with them for 16 years and made frequent use of their SFO lounge, as well as east coast lounges (DCA, BOS, JFK, PHL come to mind). I just don't see the value in buying an Alaska lounge membership being based at SFO and flying to east coast destinations that also don't have Alaska lounges (the exception being JFK, but most of my flights have been to EWR).

I still have a few 75K lounge passes I can redeem in Seattle when I'm through there for now. Still waiting for news about the SFO Alaska lounge. Open one there and I probably would purchase a membership.

How do we know this was at Alaska's request? It may have been a PP decision due to all the complaints.

Here's the relevant section from Priority Pass' (rather vague) reply when I emailed about this:

"As the participating lounges on our program are owned by third party organizations and not directly by Priority Pass, the decision to join our program is at every lounge operator’s sole discretion. The lounge operators are directly response for the policies, procedures, operating conditions and facilities provided in their lounges.

"The lounge operators are directly responsible in choosing whether or not to remain as a participating lounge on our program or whether to remove themselves off our program. As we do not own or control the participating lounges, if they wish to remove themselves from participating on our program we are legally obligated to action the request.

"I do apologise that I am not able to provide you with a more detailed response in this regard but we will only be able to confirm these details once our prospective lounge partner provides us with the confirmation of when they will be opening their facilities."

Of course I'm sure they have some sort of option to kick lounges out of the network just to be able to maintain quality, but this (form letter) makes it sound like it was AS that made the call.