I always find it super cheap and off putting when a hotel club lounge has water to pour into cups, and no bottles you can take away, like at the Grand Hyatt New York.
The same is true of airport lounges: a proper premium class lounge should encourage you to take away a bottle for the flight like the United Polaris lounge in Chicago does.
Although as much of a hard time as I give travel providers for nickel and diming premium passengers, I also understand the conundrum when some of those passengers abuse the system. The Andaz 5th Avenue used to offer unlimited complimentary room service to top tier elites, until some people started ordering one of everything on the menu.
And passengers will even stuff copious amounts of packaged Tillamook cheese into their laptop bags in the airport lounge.
Even knowing this, I’m still surprised at the behavior of a couple of passengers visiting the British Airways Galleries First Lounge at London Heathrow Terminal 5 on Friday.
Discus shared on Flyertalk an incident that perfectly captures why we can’t have nice things.
We noticed two persons grabbing a lot of beer and putting it in their bags. They had some round trips to the bar and even stopped to get more when leaving (all within 3-4 minutes) They noticed me filming, but looked like they couldn’t care less. Guess they nicked 20+ cans and 5 bags of crisps.
Watch:
What’s ok to take from the lounge, and where exactly is the line?
