It was only the week before last that I offered a review of Campanile, a restaurant in Terminal 4 at LAX. At the time, Campanile was Priority Pass’s latest addition. But the restaurant has quietly been removed from the Priority Pass directory.
If you pull up the Priority Pass URL for Campanile, you encounter this:
I reached out to a restaurant contact to try to ascertain why Campanile suddenly stopped accepting Priority Pass. I was told:
Campanile is currently not accepting Priority Pass while operational matters are worked through.
I suspect the following issues:
- Priority Pass drags its feet on payment. While credit card companies release payment within days, Priority Pass takes weeks to release payments, severely straining cashflow.
- Customers were not tipping and often just walking out even when their Priority Pass card did not cover their entire bill (Priority Pass provides $28/credit per-person).
These seem to echo some of the comments on One Mile at a Time.
That’s a shame, but strikes me as a valid explanation to dissolve the Priority Pass relationship. It simply proved more trouble than it was worth.
CONCLUSION
I love that Priority Pass continues to add airport restaurants across the country. I do fear, though, that more will turn out like Campanile as restaurants better understand the Priority Pass clientele and the difficultly in collecting payments from what I view as an unethical company.
I ate at this restaurant with my wife during a layover. They were super SLOOOOW. We waited so long for our food that we ended up asking them to box it up before it even arrived. We had to dart over to our united flight to make it on time. The food was mediocre anyways. Good riddance.
maybe you had to “dart” because you ate in terminal 4 and united is in terminal 7.
Well that too, but when we sat down we had about an hour before boarding.
my food came pretty quick and it was pretty packed. oh well, they’re no longer here anyhow.
The Priority Pass has brought massive crowds and has made it tough to get a seat. I was there last week and there was a long wait. I’ve eaten there a few times previously and I have to say that the food is absolutely execrable — barely acceptable even for being free.
That was the majority view of the Yelp and Google reviewers I looked up when their partnership was announced. The food and service has nearly unanimously bad reviews. No loss here.
I just hope PF Chang’s stays PP. 😉
While using PP at Barney’s Beanery in LAX T2, I knew in advanced the credit does not include gratuity and was already planning to pay 20% of the bill out of pocket. The server specifically informed me that gratuity was not included with the credit which I’m sure prompts most patrons to leave a tip. Perhaps Campanile servers didn’t inform patrons about this?
Incidentally, Barney’s Beanery food was good but service was really slowww. It wasn’t even half full but I had to wait about 15 minutes just to give my order.
My experience with PP at restaurants has reminded me why I often did not eat at airport restaurants – not just the expense, which is high, or that the food is not great, but that they are often so unpredictably slow. Use a lounge and you can be in and out in 20 minutes. But I would suggest that you not use PP at a restaurant unless you have at least 1 and 1/2 to 2 hours – exclusive of walking to the gate time. Typical is that you will wait for 20 minutes for someone to take your order, wait 20 minutes for the food to show up, take 15 minutes to eat, and wait 20 minutes for the check (and you can’t walk away because they have your PP card). Right there is 75 minutes.
And I do tip. I don’t take out understaffing on the servers. But I’ll bet a lot of PP cardholders are just not aware it does not come out of the 28, or they’d throw down a 5.
I’d rather have these restaurant options than nothing, and on a 4 hour layover could be great. But I’d rather be in a good lounge.