Prior to my United flight, I was hoping to use the United club, unfortunately it was slated to re-open a week after my flight, but thankfully I was traveling with a relative who has Priority Pass, so we made use of the lone Priority Pass Lounge in Terminal 1.
Here are the access rules for the Club Lounge:
- Priority Pass Select members (+ 1 or 2 guests)
- Virgin Atlantic Upper Class Passengers (+1 guest on same flight)
- Condor Business Class Passengers
- Lounge Club Members
- Lounge Key Members
- Diner’s Club International Cardholders
The entrance was pretty hard to miss, and when we checked in there was a 10-minute wait. At this point, the lounge was still capacity-constrained due to the pandemic though this is subject to change in the future.
Walking down the hall, the first thing is the lounge bathrooms:
They were pretty clean and well maintained.
From here there’s a small hall you walk down to reach the main parts of the lounge. There were open seating options by the food.
To the left was a side seating area with lounge style seating.
Now here there was the main entrance to the main seating areas. There were all sorts of seating and I had to be discrete with the pictures because despite the capacity constraints, the lounge was still fairly crowded.
The other issue is that the seats weren’t cleared very frequently. As you can see from the above picture, those are seats where people left a long time back.
There was some desk-like seating options as well and the blinds were presumably protecting against a peak-summer Vegas heat.
There were multiple sections of seating.
The lounge did boast excellent views of the tarmac and the scenery.
Do note again the lack of proactiveness from the lounge staff to clear tables of used plates and utensils.
At the far end of the lounge, was a bar that had a pretty good spread of drinks.
And here was a fun little “cheat sheet” i saw for some of their drinks. Might be a fun idea to try some of these at home.
I had the blackberry mimosa and it was quite nice. I must say that at this point, most other airlines were still serving drinks in their lounges
Now let’s have a look at the food that was there in the lounge.
Everything was behind the counter at this point, but that didn’t stop the lounge from having some options at least.
There were hot drinks, some fruits, and teas.
I had the soup, which was a creamy tomato soup and is oddly identical to the soup that United served in all its clubs pre-pandemic.
The Mediterranean plate was also pretty solid.
Overall, for a contract lounge operating in a pandemic era, this was pretty decent. There were some real and nutritious food options, a variety of drinks, decent seating areas, and clean facilities. The only complaint is that there were used plates all around the lounge and the staff need to be more proactive with cleaning those. It differentiates between a lounge and a public food area.