Worth Coming to the Airport Early For: YES (the first priority pass lounge at IAD I’ve found worth coming to)
Better Than The Terminal? YES (Good seating, good views, solid food)
How I Accessed: Priority Pass, via my Capital One Venture X
Introduction
Finally… a US priority pass lounge worth coming to? Overall I was pretty impressed by this lounge, especially after visiting the otherwise bleak situation at the other priority pass lounges at IAD right before this (the Turkish Airlines Lounge and Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse).
For an outstation lounge, I thought this place was as good as it gets. I won’t be surprised if priority pass loses access to this lounge eventually, because of how much foot traffic this lounge organically receives. That also probably explains why the food and drinks spread was legit. Even though it’s called the Air France / KLM lounge, it’s effectively the Skyteam premium / business class lounge at IAD, which means it gets tons of foot traffic from Air France / KLM / Korean business and first class passngers, along with Emirates and Icelandair which contract out the lounge for their premium passengers as well.
In this post, you’ll find:
How to Access and Find the Lounge
This lounge is located in Concourse A of IAD, right by gate A22. It’s currently open from 7:30am to 9:00pm, daily. If entering via priority pass, all you need is a same-day boarding pass and a departure time within 3 hours.
Note that peak departures for this lounge start at around 1:30pm (Korean), followed by a mix of Air France / KLM flights throughout the evening. I visited around ~11am and the lounge was already starting to fill up, so note access could be spotty if the lounge hits capacity from business class passengers later in the day vs. priority pass customers.
There was a bit of a line to get in, but after a quick scan of my priority pass QR code and boarding pass, I was in.
Lounge Review
The lounge itself is basically one large room. The lounge has great floor-to-ceiling windows, and there’s a bar right by the entrance up front.
The lounge is really well-designed, and it seemed like all the furniture in here was relatively new / recently refurbished. It felt very Air-France centric in terms of colors and design, and that’s what the French are good at.
There’s lots of different seating options, and basically surrounding the entire inner wall of the lounge is a large buffet spread:
Unlike most priority pass lounges, this lounge had a proper food and drinks spread. It felt like a legitimate international business class lounge … because it is.
They had a decent salad bar:
French bread and cheese spread:
For hot options, it was buffet-style but elevated in those Le-Creuset type of trays. Although I much prefer the grab-and-go / made-to-order restaurant concept that the best lounges feature nowadays, this was still pretty good. I visited right towards the end of breakfast hours, where they had hash browns, eggs, and sausage.
They also had nice single serving snack options:
And the setup for any possible combination of coffee or tea you could want.
The lounge was getting slammed by the time I was leaving so I couldn’t snag a picture of the bathroom, but it was clean and right through this Severance-esque hallway.
Conclusion
The Air France / KLM lounge at IAD is one of the nicer priority pass lounges I’ve been to. It’s so nice that I’m afraid it may one day be removed from priority pass, but until then – this is your best bet in terms of a priority pass lounge at Dulles Airport. If you have access to the premium credit card lounges (Capital One or Chase here at Dulles), those are marginally better. Otherwise, this lounge is a great place to hangout for an hour or two and grab a quality bite preflight.
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