Review: Greenwhich Lounge American Airlines JFK Terminal 8 Review

Worth Coming to Airport Early For: YES

The Greenwhich lounge is one of three(!!) Premium Lounges in terminal 8 in JFK. After getting lucky on a cheap upgrade bid, I got to JFK at the crack of dawn to check out this lounge.

In classic friendly American Airlines style, the lounge agent immediately looked at me and barked, “sir, this lounge is only for business class passengers”. I almost laughed. I’ll try and give her some benefit of the doubt as it was 5am and I looked like a complete bum in gym shorts in a t-shirt, but still thought this was completely unnecessary. Regardless, after I showed her my ticket, she reluctantly pointed me towards the entrance.

In terms of access, there’s two main ways you can get into this lounge:

(1) Same day international flight if you AAdvantage Platinum or MVP gold flying on American or a oneworld partner airline (can be in economy, as long as you have status).

(2) Flying flagship business on American or business on a oneworld partner. Flagship business serves international as well as domestic premium routes, like JFK-LAX/SFO/SNA. This is a nice differentiator vs. United, where even Polaris premium transcon passenges don’t have access to Polaris lounges, at least at time of writing. Anyways, on to the lounge.

Here’s the lounge. The interior is nice in a hotel lobby meets corporate office kind of vibe.

My picture below doesn’t really do it justice, but I was actually quite impressed with the breakfast spread available at 5am. I was one of three people in the massive lounge, and a full hot food spread was already out ahead of the morning rush.

Here’s another shot of the interior. The lounge has really nice booth seating as well, which I imagine becomes quite popular in peak times.

Now, on to the plane. No flight review this time because I fell asleep immediately after breakfast and woke up over the San Francisco Bay, but the lie-flat seat was fairly comfy and the oatmeal they served was pretty standard. I opted for this over the eggs because I already ate the equivalent of two breakfasts before getting on the plane, and it was still 5:30am 🙂

In terms of cost of the flight, American Airlines was offering a pretty crazy good paid upgrade option from economy for just $290.25. Pretty great deal for a flight that usually retails for over $1k one-way.