Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse Dulles Airport (IAD) Review: Don’t Come Here

Worth Coming to Airport Early For: No (this lounge is bad)

Better Than The Terminal? Barely (A fine place to hangout if quiet but overall not worth visiting)

Introduction

After checking out the mediocre Turkish Airlines lounge, it was time to continue the priority pass journey through IAD. My next stop was the Virgin Atlantic lounge. Virgin has a four lounges throughout US airports: SFO, LAX, JFK, and here at IAD. Their participation and access in priority pass has varied throughout the years, but in general priority pass holders have received a watered-down experience / more restrictive hours vs. if you were to access during a Virgin departure bank with a business class ticket.

Overall, this lounge was quite strange, in a bad way. The interior design felt like the inside of a 90s-style furniture store going through liquidation. The food / drink offerings were pretty bleak, at least during priority pass access hours. They also charge for some food options, which defeats the point of an airport lounge in my opinion. If accessing ahead of a Virgin flight, it’s likely better, but still not a lounge I’d carve out time for ahead of a flight.

In this post, you’ll find:

Access & Where to Find the Lounge

This lounge is currently open to priority pass members from 9am to 7pm, daily. It’s located in concourse A, right by gate A32. Standard rules apply: you need to have a same-day boarding pass with a departure time within 3 hours to enter.

Currently, Virgin Atlantic has one daily departure out of IAD at 11pm, which leaves the airline in a weird spot where this outstation lounge would otherwise be completely empty during the majority of the day. Like other foreign airline-run lounges in the US, they have turned to priority pass to try and monetize their otherwise under-utilized space. I wonder how much they earn from their priority pass contract….

The entrance to the lounge is right near gate A32:

Lounge Review

This lounge is structured in two levels. Note the entire upper floor was closed off when I visited in the morning since we weren’t anywhere close to the scheduled Virgin Atlantic flight. It was fairly empty when I visited in late morning.

The lounge has a funky design with lots of bright colors, in line with Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse branding.

One highlight of this space is that if empty, it’s pretty quiet and relaxing. They also don’t try and cram the seating here, so it felt very open. Here is the main seating area:

The lounge features a central bar with “food”. I put that in quotes because it’s an extremely meager spread.

Fruit cup, bagels, or muffins from Costco?

Luckily, they did have British food in the form of potato chips labeled … crisps. What is going on here.

The stairway to the upper floor was blocked off during priority pass hours:

The main seating area does have a ton of natural light and floor to ceiling windows, which is great for watching the planes go by.

There’s also a proper bar and dining seating area tucked into the back corner of the lounge.

Tables here feature QR codes, where you can order food. However, many of these options are … paid. To me, this completely undermines the purpose of an airline lounge. Pay money for your credit card so you have the opportunity to pay more money for microwaved crabcakes? No thanks.

They did have some free options though, and the selection was extremely strange. Onigiri + penne pasta + butter chicken? A true spread of British food.

Here was the bar, appropriately empty at 10am in the morning today:

The bathrooms in the back were standard, and nicer than the bathrooms in the terminal:

Conclusion

Overall, this lounge is nothing special. The physical space itself is fine, albeit a bit funky in design, with lots of natural light and comfortable seating. However, the entire food and drink situation is functionally non-existent, and any substantial food requires a purchase. If you want a quiet place to hang out then this lounge is fine, otherwise would skip this one.