I spent 30 minutes in the Lufthansa G24 Senator Lounge in Munich prior to my flight to Frankfurt and enjoyed a tender piece of chicken and the ability to print, which was suddenly vital to continuing my journey to Kenya.
Lufthansa Senator G28 Lounge Munich Review (MUC)
I would not have left the Senator Cafe but I needed to print a document (my visa to Kenya) and figured a Senator Lounge would have a printing facility. Thankfully, it did.
Lufthansa has two Senator lounges in the Schengen Area of Terminal 2 at Munich Airport one near G24 and this one near G28. I prefer the G24 lounge because barista-made coffee is available, but had never checked out this one and it certainly served its purpose. This lounge is open daily from 5:00 am to 10:00 pm.
Access requires Star Alliance Gold status. Those passengers traveling in business class on a Star Alliance carrier can use the Lufthansa Business Lounge which is located directly above the Senator Lounge. For what it’s worth, I took a peak inside the business lounge (upstairs) and it appears a lot more modern:
The Senator Lounge, at 5:00 pm on a Monday, was quite busy. Most seats were taken, though I still did not have trouble finding a seat. After dealing with the printing issue (which was not without trial – a lounge agent had to reset the machine and there are many steps before you can obtain the printout), I sat down to work. Internet was blazing fast and I also used the time to charge my devices, which I foolishly did not charge on my long flight from San Francisco to Munich.
A couple small rooms with three windows are intended for telephone calls.
I really wasn’t hungry, but the chicken looked so delicious I decided to try a piece…it was just as delicious as it looked and it nice that the COVID-19 cutbacks at Lufthansa Senator Lounges appear to have been rolled back. It’s a shame I had no appetite because the beetroot soup, Nurnberg-style sausages with sauerkraut, and falafel peas balls with spinach cream and baby spinach, all sounded delicious. There was a nice salad, bread rolls, meat, cheese, and a number of desserts also available.
Alcohol was self-serve with beer, wine, and spirits (including four different Bacardi rums and three different gins from Bombay Sapphire). Soft drinks, coffee, tea, and juice were also available.
Restrooms were available and showers were available upon request, with a hilarious warning to take short showers “if possible.”
I was tickled to see newspapers and magazines available. I dislike the trend to digitize all newspapers and periodicals, though I understand that achieves both cost-cutting and “green” goals.
CONCLUSION
While the G24 Senator Lounge (or nearby Senator Cafe) are both superior Lufthansa Senator Lounges in the Schengen area of Munich because both offer barista-made coffee, I appreciated the generous selection of food and ability to print in this lounge. Bottom line: this lounge served my needs and helped me to get my document printed. Although that seems almost antiquated today, I still appreciate lounges which have printers, copiers, scanners, and fax machines.
You’ve heard of chicken and waffles, but Matthew’s lounge criteria are “chicken and printer”
And barista made coffee.
Most important thing!
Interesting that you bring up the magazines and newspapers being in print form. I often prefer print for magazines and wondered if the print magazine was a dying thing and recently tried to figure that out. Best I could tell from searching around on the internet, print magazine readership seems to be holding steady as of late. Anyone else have some insight/ data on that?
It’s not necessarily becoming obsolete but it’s mixed. My mother and her next door neighbor still love their many magazines..Real Simple, People, Us, Better Homes and Gardens and many others, plus local and national papers. They trade magazines weekly or monthly. Forbes and Quora detailed these challenges with magazines. Consumption seems to be the most relevant behind cost:
1) Cost. Cost is the most obvious one: Printing a magazine costs money, and those costs go beyond the actual physical printing of the publication itself. There’s the cost of staffing a print magazine, which requires art directors and/or designers, plus writers. Art is another cost: We hire illustrators and photographers to create original art, and we license existing art for stories where we might need historical or other existing images. For this special edition, we worked with two separate fact-checkers as well as a copyeditor. Then there’s the printing of the magazine itself, and if you’re a regular print magazine with subscribers, the cost of postage is one major expense that few people think about.
2) Competition. Competition, of course, is always going to be a challenge—whether you’re in publishing or any other business. The key here is creating a product that clearly stands above the “competition,” while becoming unique enough that you almost have no direct “competition.” But whereas 10 to 20 years ago, a print magazine’s main competition came from other print magazines, now it comes from the web, too. Which means that anyone who is creating content is competing with millions of other places that produce content, so you need to make sure that it’s compelling and unique.
3) Consumption. Consumption is a digital era challenge: Millennials and younger generations have grown up in a largely digital-only era, meaning that consuming their content via digital devices is what they know and are most comfortable with. So if you want to attract these readers to a print magazine, you have the added challenge of selling them on the power and benefit of print. (In case you’re wondering: Several scientific studies have shown that print can be great for your brain and your health.)
4) Cutting text to fit. One other challenge I want to mention, which I know my print editors out there will understand: Cutting text to fit! Fitting copy within a certain space isn’t something you have to think about when you work on the internet. Once we were looking at layouts for the magazine, we realized that many of our stories were way too long, which meant we spent hours cutting that text to fit. When I worked in print, I loved cutting fit; it’s one of those tedious tasks that appeals to me because it’s almost a puzzle to be solved—how can I express what we’re trying to say in a sentence instead of two paragraphs? It is torture when you’re doing it, but when that piece finally fits, you feel like you could take on the world.–
“In America, 25,000 companies are specialists in commercial printing. It generates approximately $900 billion in revenue annually,” according to Vice President of Sales Pratik Mistry, with Radix, who wrote about “The Future of Print Industry in 2023 and Beyond.”
Although the printing industry as a whole has been experiencing growth, newspaper pressrooms are shuttering or consolidating at accelerating rates. For example, the Los Angeles Times will shut down its downtown Los Angeles printing facility in 2024.–
https://www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/print-is-far-from-obsolete,241894
I could sit there and eat Käsebretzeln and Weissbier for hours. Thankfully for my waistline, it don’t get to go too often.
I am glad that the (some?) LH lounges still have printers as those have been useful several times over the past few months. I guess LH figured out that printers don’t spread COVID. I’d like to see UA return printers to its lounges.
So LH has three lounges if I’m tracking. First (though maybe the First Class Terminal and the First lounges should be viewed as distinct products), Business, and Senator. Do I have that right?
Is Status the only way into the Senator lounge? Is it a step up from the Business class lounge or essentially equivalent? If your flying Business with status which lounge do you think is better?
Status is the only way to get you into Senator Lounge. Senator lounges offer slightly superior food and drink variety and are often less crowded (quite common to be standing in Business lounges in FRA and MUC during peak hours). Flying business class with status, going to Senator lounge instead of business is an obvious choice.
Amex Platinum Card holders on a business class ticket also get access to this lounge. (and Amex Platinum holders on a coach ticket gets access to the Business Lounge. Zoo)
Was there recently and not impressed.