Airport lounges have all kinds of different entry requirements. Some are open to first and business class passengers. Some are open to Priority Pass members. Some require travelers to purchase access.
Continue reading: Hah: Chinese Airport Lounge Requires $2.8 Million In Assets For Entry
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
For large city like chengdu and capital of west of China. I can see that this threshold is easily surpassed. Anyway, visit the new air china lounge in TFU for much better experience.
There's no shortage of affluent people who exclusively travel in Y because they're frugal, keen on obtaining value for money for every transaction they make, or even because they use that choice as a virtue signalling opportunity to show their employees, family members, and/or the world at large that they're prudent, humble, environmentally conscious or whatever. The virtue signalling thing (maybe apart from the environmentally conscious bit) is particularly true in developing countries where premium class travel is unaffordable to the vast majority of the population - China may be full of millionaires nowadays, but real poverty is still fresh in the minds of hundreds of millions of its residents.
Isn't this what people complaining about lounge crowding have always wanted?
Restrictions to keep the poors out.
Not humble bragging, but my net worth is $5m+ and I still fly economy almost all the time, except when I'm redeeming points for long hauls.
Well, if anyone is interested in a review of this $2.8mm lounge, look no further 😉 https://www.satayaway.blog/blog-sea-level-prelude/review-chengdu-tianfu-international-first-and-business-class-lounge-terminal-1
I'm still going to take calls on speakphone, put my feet up on the wall and load my plate up 2 feet tall from the buffet. I'm also going to drink all the cheap liquor as if it's going to run out.
Quite often business class is ridiculously overpriced. KLM will happily charge you €800+ for four sectors on Embraers without a blocked seat or any cutlery onboard and with access to a rodent-infested lounge. There's no reason to accept that sort of price for that level of service just because you happen to have a large amount of money in the bank.
I think people have a really weird perception of the ultra-wealthy. They're not just a singular group. Some of them don't always take biz or first, e.g. someone snapped a pic of the son of Chinese billionaire Wang Jianlin taking a low cost carrier earlier this week. He was in an aisle seat while rocking a PP x Tiffany Nautilus 5711 lol
This is Gary tabloid content.
$2.8M is peanuts.
Many banks already have $10M tier. Many of those comes with Priority Pass.
One could say every Priority Pass lounge requires $10M.
That being said, this TFU lounge is nothing special than your typical Chinese lounge. The only bad thing is the airport has monopoly and don't allow airlines to have their own lounges. Everyone uses this huge lounge. Therefore no airline VIP escort to the gates anymore.
When did that open?
The lounge discussed here is on the international side not domestic.
Regardless, I would say this is on par with the domestic CA lounge.
This article feels overly sensational. While Ben does mention first and business class passengers have access, the headline and intro feel misleading.
Anyway, I’ve been to this lounge. It was ok and comfortable but not amazing. It’s very spacious with multiple sections for dining/lounging/sleeping. It’s the only lounge option here so you don’t really have a choice.
CMB being CMB, lol. Above the Golden Flower tier, there’s a program called Private Banking, which requires a 10 million RMB relationship threshold—or 5 million if your manager wants to give you a taste—known as Private Diamond.
Prior to November 2023, you and one guest had unlimited domestic lounge access. After that, they “enhanced” the program with a ridiculous points system full of caps and restrictions. I even heard some Beijing lounges require you to have a Beijing-registered account. Seriously, what kind of person with such a large portfolio has the time to figure out the whole point accrual and redemption system?
Until mid-2024, they also issued a Priority Pass for unlimited overseas lounge access, renewable every three years. Now, that too has been dragged into the points system, along with a bunch of other former perks. Being part of their most exclusive program practically offers zero benefit—unless you have the time and energy to study the whole convoluted system. The only obvious perk is your phone app UI turning slightly more golden.
Golden Flower used to be exclusive twenty years ago, but it’s been watered down—just like their Platinum program before it. Even the so-called priority queues are often longer than the regular ones, unless you reserve in advance with your bank manager.
But still, CMB doesn’t have much real competition. They remain the most civilized and internationally-minded bank in China—at least on a large scale.
Only politically. Economically, it's more capitalist than any Western country; everything costs money, and no welfare for nobody. It'd be a shock and disappointment for the socialists in the West to find that out.
It's not true to say there's no welfare for nobody, although the system is far from perfect, and some parts of it are threatening to break apart at the seams, with health insurance being a particular worry.
You can't call the Chinese economy "socialist" anymore, not by a long shot. They love their money as much as any American, and are just a savvy when it comes to making it. Of the first fifty people on Forbes' list of Real Time Billionaires, eight are either Chinese nationals or of Chinese origin. They're coming for you, and they're unstoppable.
A) People who are worth a few million generally don't flaunt it around.
B) If you want to address the lounges overcrowding, just implement a no shorts/no flip flops policy and immediately get rid of 80% of the line. Put on some pants and shoes to fly. You're not 10 anymore. More like 6.
How is this flaunting? It's just a perk.
This is also nothing that new for Asia. Changi Airport has an Asia Treasures lounge that has the limit set at just over $1m USD and that has been the bar for years. Many of their customers are well over the limit.
So what you're saying is you also got embarrassingly rejected from this lounge for being poor?? Just get to the point, lady. We ain't got all day..
I haven't been to TFU unfortunately. Probably would get into it, despite being too poor, using my shiny airline card.
The point is inverse snobbery and virtue signalling are extremely common. Whether you need all day to process that information depends on things like your attention span and overall level of understanding of complexity and nuance...
LOL I usually do the opposite. I fly CX, EK and SQ in First Class wearing UNIQLO T-shirts and shorts. I stay in Aman and Rosewood wearing my Casio watches bought from Carousell.
There's nothing wrong with flaunting one's wealth around, and many people do that all the time without harming anyone.
It's definitely not my style to display the little wealth I have (it's rare for me to even wear stuff displaying any brand logos), but I'm not going to criticise anyone choosing to express themselves in such a way. If there's something that I do feel like criticising, it's the antiquated religious (and especially Protestant) expectation for people to refrain from openly enjoying the fruits of their labour and/or good luck (funnily enough, there's another Protestant fallacy closely associated with that - namely the assumption that success can only be the result of hard work, and that anyone who's not successful only needs to work harder).
It's sort of hilarious as a barrier for economy customers, all the more so realizing how wealthy one would be to have $2.8M in liquid wealth would be in China today (their per-capita GDP, even adjusted for PPP is quite a lot lower than the "west"). And it's a weird thing to have to prove to get into a lounge.
That’s how you tell new money, at least in the western countries. Old money generally finds it tasteless to display wealth just for the sake of display. New money doesn’t know about taste for the most part. I’ve known plenty of old money families and have had some discrete discussions on the subject.
Not dissimilar to the DBS treasures/private access lounge in Singapore, I believe? It’s got decent food and is quieter than the SQ business lounge zoo. But nothing to get too excited about.
I hope he had a bodyguard travelling with him. A watch like that screams “STEAL ME!” a loudly as a factory siren at ten paces.
I’ll wager some contributors to this board pay more capitals gains tax than that every year.
Seems like an awful lot of trouble for for an alcoholic beverage, if it was cannabis, might try it once if I was bored or rich.
I worked hard so that I could fly up the tippy end in shorts without being judged.
Most of the time, people who work for me dress much better than I do, why build something that gives me freedom of "f*u money" if I'm not going to enjoy it?
I might add, this is an invasion of privacy telling them how much money you have. And what is a rich person doing at the regular airport "waiting" for their flight? They can be off and fast in their private plane.
@Gavin, what I meant is I don't know what the actual mechanism is for gaining access, and maybe I'm getting confused with another headline on this that read "blah blah blah...prove it", but I'm guessing there are a lot of people who wouldn't just show up and pull up their stock portfolio and show some rando at the door so they can be let inside. There's plenty of wealthy people who make it a point not to go around telling people how wealthy they are, because they don't want the attention and risk that comes with it.
@FLCL, there's always Cinnabon by the A gates. Places set dress codes all the time. F*ck you money doesn't mean f*ck yo rules.
I used this lounge in 2023 when TFU was a brand new airport. It was exceptional. It just about sets the bar for a contract lounge.
Throwawayname …. wealth, in the majority of cases, does not equal taste or breeding. Two attributes sadly lacking in most of the world’s nouveau riche ….:-)
Often business class is disproportunately expensive. This said, TFU is a huge airport in China. This is not the only lounge. Note that this is a bank cooperative lounge and not a lounge with an airline. If you have status with an airline or if you have a business class ticket you could visit the airline lounge or an alternative lounge.