Berlin Tegel’s Terminal A Priority Pass lounge is tiny. But I suppose it beats the oft-crowded gate areas at TXL.
Rather than spend my entire time in the nearby Lufthansa Lounge, I also checked out the nearby Priority Pass lounge, called the Berlin Airport Club.
It’s a very small contract lounge used by primarily for credit card holders, but also for Vueling, TUI, and Air Malta (tier one carriers of course…). It is open Monday thru Saturday from 6:45AM to 9:00PM and on Sunday from 7:45AM to 9:00PM. Like most lounges at TXL, it is located landside, prior to security.
The lounge is essentially one fairly small room with some couches, chairs, and tables.
There’s a limited selection of food and beverages, including coffee, tea, water, soft drinks, juice, and alcohol. Food selection included sandwiches, sausage, meatballs, tomatoes, pudding, and apples. Nothing looked fresh and I did not eat or drink anything during my brief stay.
No restrooms that I saw.
CONCLUSION
This is not the lounge you arrive early for. In fact, it is one of the most pitiful lounges I’ve ever seen. Even so, I’d rather wait here and have a cup of coffee or glass of water than waiting in the gate area.
It looks way better than the BA lounge at TXL which is run down even by BA standards.
I missed visiting this lounge when I flew Finnair a couple years ago. Forgot it was before security, passed thru security, and then decided it wasn’t worth going through security again. Seems I did not miss much…
It’s a lounge with furniture that should have been replaced 10+ years ago and now managed by contractor staff. While BA staff were still employed in Germany they had some sense of pride about it but no longer. The food offering is crisps and pre-packed sandwiches. The drinks are soft and supermarket €2/bottle wine. The best bet is the coffee machine if you are thirsty.
What we need to see now is what is provided at BER. It was to be an AB lounge but as AB is no more will BA provide the lounge – hopefully a big improvement on TXL as the biggest OW operator to BER or will it be a OW lounge or will they just use contract lounges.
The BA lounge isn’t anything special…but it still better than this lounge overall, I have to say.
One of the most pitiful Priority Pass lounges I’ve seen was in Kaliningrad, Russia. It was packed with people and had a small corner of pre-packaged snacks. On the plus side, I think I remember seeing caviar ;).
I still believe that the worst lounge ever was in Palermo.
It had one plate with dry mini sandwiches, there were only two of those left. And that was it for the food. There was also a fridge with coke and beer and coffee from a Lavazza coffee machine that you had to pay for (!).
Maybe something changed, but I couldn’t believe my eyes when I visited.