BA and Berlin-Brandenburg
 

I see the head of BER has reiterated that the airport will open on 31 October 2020. Presumably TXL will then close shortly after.

Putting to to one side for the moment the scepticism that anyone who has followed this interminable saga will have about the likelihood of this happening, would it be reasonable to expect BA to open a lounge at BER and if so how long after the opening date might that be?

My guess- it’s probably already built (recall that the 2012 opening date was postponed on the day)

there is probably also a flagship air Berlin lounge too...

I for one will believe it when it happens.

A couple of years ago CWS said that BA was intending to use the Air Berlin lounge:
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/brit...andenburg.html

When Brandenburg opens, would UK still be a member of EU?

I’d say the later is as likely as BER opening.

Why would it matter?

And I think Air Berlin took it over from Malév. Still, the one thing AB were not that good at doing was running lounges, their only example was at DUS and Hugo Junkers is/was a lot better. My uninformed guess is that either BER makes BA an amazing offer of a free lounge at BER, as happened in ABZ, or we'll end up with the usual Euro Third Party arrangement. I hope it's the former.

Would you care to speculate? Will BER have lots of spare capacity due to demise of Air Berlin and, I believe, Lufthansa were going to open a Berlin base which ended up being scrapped. I appreciate LCCs are bigger now, but their demand for lounges is lower (albeit I appreciate demand for 3rd party may be higher).

BA operates flights from City, Stansted and Heathrow so has probably similar demand to places where euro outstation (or OW) lounges exist so you would have thought that Berlin would be as good a candidate as any. But that’s pure speculation. Is it really BA’s policy that unless it’s free they won’t invest in lounges within Europe, even in a key capital city? Surely there is a branding / positioning opportunity to compete with *A who presumably will have a Senator lounge. BA has after all maintained its lounge at Tegel for all these years even after feed from the regions stopped after BA Connect was disposed of to flybe. TXL always seems to have a lot of premium connecting traffic which is presumably why somewhere like Manchester gets to keep its lounge whilst somewhere like Malaga doesn’t get its own.

Failing that I wonder if a good third party operator might snap up the space.

I will miss Tegel when it is gone.

I had an ‘insider’s’ tour of BER a few months ago. To keep a complex story short, the lounge layout/allocation that was in the blueprints a decade or so ago has changed because of the changes ultimately required by the internal fire doors. This is very much a watch this space item.

Do you get to see the lounges on the 10€ tour?

No. This was a private tour related to a project I am involved in.

So, if it isn’t professionally damaging to you to offer an opinion, is the opening date realistic?

Is the plan to close TXL if BER opens? Or would it be considered a "city airport" similar to LCY?

If the later then is there a possibility BA could move LHR flights to BER but leave LCY flights going to TXL?

The statement made last week is, in the opinion of several people I know who are professionally close to BER (sorry to be so vague), politically motivated. Their opinion, to put it succinctly, is 'we'll believe it when it actually happens'. A lengthier way of saying this is that, even if it does open in October, it won't be the end, or even the beginning of the end, as there are parallel plans to increase capacity, as well as work on the existing terminal and infrastructure that will continue, albeit no so much in customer-obvious ways. An interesting anecdote, for example, and one I'm not sure was widely reported, is that all display screens were replaced in 2018 at a cost of ca EUR 0.5 million, having reached the end of their useful life, without any passenger ever having laid eyes on them.