ARCHIVE: Guide to Flagship Lounge Access (expanded 2017) thru 2018

Closed Thread Subscribe

Thread Tools

Search this Thread

Dec 19, 2018, 10:06 pm

#496

SeattleDavid

Join Date: Jul 2003

Location: Gatwick, UK

Programs: UA *G, BA Silver

Posts: 1,673

Quote:

Originally Posted by Global321

I think you have to put it together using common sense.
Status:
"To be eligible, you must be departing on a flight that is both marketed and operated by a oneworld member airline." - safe to say this means departing THAT day. What else could it be?

Class of service:
"First and Business Class customers connecting on the same day of travel, or before 6am the following day" - pretty clear.

For AA members:
"American Airlines AAdvantage® members, regardless of their tier status or class of travel, are not eligible for lounge access when travelling solely on North American flights within or between the U.S., Canada, Mexico (except Mexico City), the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Caribbean." - It would seem very logical to say if you are flying the day before, it is 'solely' NA.

What other way is there to reasonably interpret this to mean FL lounge access the previous day domestic flight?

In theory, are you saying if it is an international itinerary and I have stopovers in MIA, JFK and LAX over 3-4 days, one can access FL lounge on each day as an AA elite?

Not trying to be argumentative, just trying to understand how you can interpret the rules to mean the previous day(s) domestic flights should grant access to the FL lounge.

I don't think arguing about it is a helpful way to go. You are offering an interpretation that makes little sense to me. If the same day rule were so obvious why would it need explicitly stating in one situation and not explicitly stating in the others? The rules for EXP members never says 'same day' it simply talks about international itineraries, which are deinfitely not defined by 'same day travel'. For example, an international flight might arrive after the last onward flight and so that connection is inevitably next day. It is almost certainly one itinerary.

An even clearer example is the one that someone else asked about - a redeye from LAX-ORD followed by a morning international flight from ORD. This is one itinerary; the passenger is departing on a OneWorld flight, but it is not on the same day as the international flight. Nor is the trip solely in N America.

Thus it is easy to find examples - this thread has many of them - where the absence of an explicit 6am rule would imply a different interpretation. If the 6am rule were meant to apply to all qualifying passengers, and not just non-status First and Business passengers then the asterisk would occur in all entries.

For me this started because I wanted to know what defined an 'itinerary' or how one should interpret 'solely' - like you it seems reasonable to me to think that a 4-day connection might break an itinerary, but when does an itinerary become two itineraries?