London City Airport Getting First-Ever Lounge: How Exclusive Will It Be?

Great to see new options at LCY though it does take away a little of the charm of LCY, to me...

What a great small airport and even more fun for aviation nerds doing the takeoff roll then staying under the Heathrow traffic for a few miles.

The beauty of LCY is that in my case it is an "in and out" airport. It is so convenient that you can plan accordingly to get into the airport with enough time to go through security and to your gate. For me, no need for lounges. This will probably be another excuse for people to get drunk before a flight.

I wonder if they expect any transatlantic traffic in their future.

For me LCY is just as much a pain to travel there as LTN and STN. The upside is no Ryanair or EasyJet proletariat.

ORD might be ‘his’ second home, however, LHR was mine …. 🙂

I wonder given the airport's clientele, if it would make sense to run it down the length of the concourse and have direct boarding to at least some of the gates (well direct access to the stairs to the apron anyway)? Its not like the airport is very big. I feel like that would provide a much greater incentive to their monetization model. But based on the renderings and description of the entrance I have to assume they are just plopping it on top of the security hall.

Cool. I've only flown into LCY, which was a neat approach (great views of the city). I'd imagine whatever they open, if they don't build an expansive lounge, or restrict a lot of people, it's gonna by quite crowded there. LOL "five(ish)"

Super excited. Hopefully the main terminal returns to something much calmer as a result of lounge overcrowding. Used to enjoy flying through LCY in the early/mid nineties

"After all, with the lounge only opening next year, access requirements maybe haven’t yet been ironed out." I would think access requirements / monetization would be a part of the business model needed to even propose the lounge in the first place?

I wouldn't read that quote as access not being offered based on class of travel or status. It simply outlines that a direct purchase will be possible, which doesn't rule out other options. At the end of the day, I assume they will simply price the lounge based on the normal demand and supply principles and if some airlines decides they want to pay 100€ per pax, the lounge will be happy to accept that.

I can see airlines offering this for ultra-premium tiers maybe? E.g. FB Platinum would get access but FB Gold would not (like the arrangement they have with the "higher tier lounge" at FCO).

Good news

Surprised this has taken so long considering how much of a business airport it is and how close to Canary Wharf it is. Plus it's genuinely in London unlike most London airports.

Most Aspire lounges in the UK are Priority Pass so I'd expect this one to be too. Also can see BA buying into it like they do at NCL

I think Ben's take is right - this would be overwhelmed if KLM and BA elite/business and PP got access. But I can see a value in it for people who need to be at the airport early, or know they have a delay. City airport is great - using it this week. But it's not somewhere that's fun to linger. I could imagine paying £50 if I had 2 hours to kill there (the restaurants are expensive). But as a PP and BA Gold, I have zero expectation to get access.

The biggest issue with London City Airport is that getting there by road is a complete wildcard.
Look at Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, or Luton—it doesn’t matter which direction you're coming from. Once you’re finally on the right highway (the M4, M23, M11, or M1), you have a smooth, predictable run in. LCY has absolutely none of that. The only clean, predictable road approach into City is if you happen to be coming from the East. If you're coming from the West, North, or South, it's a total guessing game.
If you're coming from anywhere west, you're forced to choose between slicing through the central gridlock or playing Russian roulette with the ring roads. From Mayfair, a clean run down the Embankment might take 30 to 40 minutes if the transport gods actually smile on you. But on a standard day? You can easily get stuck at Piccadilly Circus for 30 minutes alone just trying to cross Shaftesbury Avenue and still have an hour more of crisscrossing Central London. The alternatives angles are just as miserable. Trying to bypass the center by dragging yourself all the way around the A406 from somewhere like Hampstead, or navigating the A40 and the Inner Ring Road from Holland Park, is a total gamble—it’s either a smooth 40 minutes or a brutal, soul-crushing 2.5-hour crawl.
Honestly, what we really need is Sadiq Khan replaced so he stops messing up London's roads, and cars can actually get them back from cycle lanes to get traffic moving again. What we actually need are proper 8-lane highways and tunnels approaching the City airport from the West at the very least—which would fix things for the West End and City, and massively rescue the NW and W postcodes. But even better would be actual highways approaching from the North, South, East, and West, rather than just a lone, average approach from the East.
Because of this constant road lottery, you can’t just wally up to the airport 20 minutes before boarding anymore; you have to bake in a massive traffic buffer just in case the entire city grinds to a halt. The ultimate irony is that check-in and security at LCY are actually fast. So when you do catch a rare clean run, you just end up killing hours sitting at a loud, pub-style airport restaurant for absolutely no reason, nursing a drink and staring at a menu when you aren't even hungry.
We shouldn't even need a lounge at LCY; the entire selling point of the airport is that we should be able to just arrive and walk straight to the gate. And as for this new Aspire contract lounge? Let’s be real about good vs. bad lounges. The London lounges with genuinely decent food and top-tier service are the flagship spaces run directly by premium global airlines—think Emirates, Qantas, Qatar, or Cathay Pacific. British Airways (which are probably considered the 'flag' carrier at LCY so would be invested in this project) lounges are just "ok," and honestly, the people who think BA lounges are great only think so because they don't know any better.
None of those premium airlines fly out of LCY, and they likely never will. Independently operated third-party contract lounges are almost universally mediocre. At best, a priority-pass style lounge here is just going to offer slightly comfier seats, a crowded room, and bad airport food buffet-style. It’s definitely not a premium experience, and it’s absolutely not something anyone should pay out of pocket to enter.

Or just take the DLR.

According to the old Top Gear episode a speedboat is the way to go

I knew that was coming.

How easy is it to get on the DLR from Mayfair or Hampstead?

One change from hampstead tube for hampstead; or from green park or bond st for Mayfair.

Definitely a missed opportunity that LCY never got a lizzard line station.

The biggest strength of City is how quickly they get you from the entrance to the gate. I question how much use the lounge will get seeing as a lot of people turn up to City with relatively little time before their flight departs

What?? Where does the DLR connect to the Northern or Piccadilly lines? Please help me understand this!

Saying it’s just ‘one change’ ignores how absurd changing at Bank actually is with luggage. Schlepping rolling bags or a garment bag through the endless subterranean maze of Bank station during peak hours completely defeats the point of a premium, efficient airport experience.

The lack of an Elizabeth Line station completely isolates LCY. If you live anywhere near the West End or northwest, Heathrow is a predictable, painless 15-minute shot on the Heathrow Express from Paddington, or a direct 30 to 40-minute run on the Elizabeth Line. If getting to LCY takes nearly an hour of gridlock or a frustrating multi-leg Tube journey, it completely loses its time-saving advantage.

Back in the days when BA flew the A318 via SNN to JFK, there used to be a gate lounge for BA1/BA3 passengers at LCY.

You’re talking about access for people who live west or central. And for folks who live east, what do you think the experience getting to LHR is like?

If I leave before 6am, I can probably manage a taxi to LHR in 50 minutes. On a really bad day, it’s 2 hours. Public transportation, with walking and transfers, it’s an hour… but a nightmare if schlepping a lot of luggage.

I am frankly quite glad that LCY is not as well-connected as you’re suggesting… as it is the only thing keeping that airport moving with expediency. So please allow us East Londoners the handful of LCY destinations in some relative peace. 😉

@JH

You’re completely missing the point about the lounge, and comparing the Central-to-LCY commute to your East-to-LHR run doesn’t track at all.
Yes, getting to LHR from the East takes time, but you have the M25. It might be a slow crawl, but it’s predictable. It follows standard UK traffic patterns across the board: it’s clear before the 7am school runs, busy from 7–10am and 3–6:30pm, packed on a Friday night, and quiet on Sundays. Depending on what time you leave, you know exactly what you’re getting into because it’s far enough out to follow normal life.
Central London is a completely different animal. There are absolutely NO patterns. It could be 2pm on a Tuesday, but just because the sun came out, or a parade is happening, or some idiot with a flag is dancing in the street, you suddenly can’t cross Shaftesbury Avenue. The A406 is just as volatile because it’s the panic route everyone dumps onto when they decide to abandon their original plan.
Because of this total lack of predictability, even getting to Heathrow from the NW and W postcodes can vary wildly from 30 minutes to 2 hours.
But here is the crucial difference: nobody is rocking up to Heathrow 20 minutes before a flight anyway. LHR is designed for dwell time. LCY’s entire selling point is the 20-minute curb-to-gate sprint. It shouldn't need a lounge. But because the road network from Central and West London is pure roulette, we are forced to bake in massive traffic buffers, arrive early, and sit around doing nothing. That’s exactly why the situation at LCY is broken.

Two thirds of LCY passengers use public transport to access the airport. Unsurprising seeing as the DLR takes you directly to Bank in the Square Mile or Stratford/Canning Town for onward connections.

Their journey time is very predictable and so they really can arrive 60 mins before departure. I've done it multiple times when my office was near Bank.

Northern to DLR at Bank is incredibly easy, one escalator practically from platform to platform. When North Quay is complete there will be a simpler connection between Poplar DLR and Canary Wharf Crossrail.

It is completely fair to say that LCY still flawlessly executes its original brief: the point-to-point business sprint. If you are hopping from Moorgate to Amsterdam, Zurich, or Frankfurt for an afternoon meeting with nothing but a slim briefcase, the DLR is fine and the airport works beautifully.
But the narrative that LCY is exclusively this hyper-efficient, bag-free corporate bubble is totally outdated. The airport's trajectory has fundamentally shifted, and it’s running into an infrastructure mismatch on two distinct fronts.
First, look at BA’s heavy pivot into premium leisure. They are aggressively targeting holidaymakers, flying to destinations like Florence, Marbella, San Sebastián, and Toulon, alongside winter schedules dedicated to ski hotspots like Chambéry and Innsbruck. This creates a glaring logistical contradiction. Nobody is hauling golf clubs, ski gear, or two weeks of family luggage onto a packed DLR train at Bank during the evening rush hour. They are taking cars. And even if they tolerate the drive, LCY’s internal infrastructure simply wasn't designed for it—the terminal hits a wall when a flight full of families and oversized ski bags drops its load onto those two tiny baggage reclaim belts.
Second, you have the legacy hub carriers like KLM, SWISS, and Lufthansa pushing long-haul connection itineraries out of LCY to the Far East or the US West Coast. The marketing pitch here is actually highly compelling: instead of dealing with the sprawling terminal treks at Heathrow, you clear London in 20 minutes and save your actual lounge dwelling for the superior flagship hubs in Amsterdam, Zurich, or Frankfurt. It’s a brilliant strategy for a fast exit, but it brings you right back to the luggage problem. If you are going away for a multi-week trip to Tokyo or Los Angeles, you have serious checked bags, which immediately takes public transport off the table and forces you into a car.
And this is where the airport fails those of us based around Marylebone or St John's Wood. On paper, Heathrow and City look like a highly comparable drive. In a vacuum, you'd choose City every single time to escape the chaotic scale of Heathrow T2 or T5—who wouldn't want a manageable, 20-minute terminal experience?
But the transit reality is a massive gamble. The issue isn't the major arteries like the Embankment or the Limehouse Link—those are actually relatively predictable once you manage to get on them. The real nightmare is the agonizing, unpredictable crawl through the narrow inside side roads of Mayfair, Soho, and Holborn just trying to escape Central London to reach those arteries in the first place.
The airport is caught in a massive identity crisis. It has successfully attracted the high-yield revenue of premium leisure families and global connecting passengers—both of whom love the concept of a quick London getaway and hub-lounge dwelling abroad. But by shifting away from the bag-free commuter, it is funneling passengers who are heavily dependent on cars and baggage space into a terminal with regional-strip baggage facilities, all while relying on a road network that requires navigating the worst bottleneck side streets in London.

@fl360, your '2/3' stat is generous. The actual CAA data puts public transport usage at LCY around 65%. That means **more than a third of all passengers**—well over a million people a year—are still relying on cars and taxis.
That is a massive chunk of the airport's demographic being funneled onto an abysmal road network, and the reason they are driving is precisely because the public transport option you are championing is completely unviable for them.
Waving away the logistical friction by saying 'just look at onward connections from Bank or Stratford' fundamentally ignores the reality of the Tube map for anyone who doesn't happen to live on a direct pipeline to those two specific stations.
For a huge portion of London, reaching the DLR means a minimum of one change, and very often two, three, or even four train swaps. Now imagine doing that with actual checked luggage, ski gear, or a family in tow.
If you are starting from West or Central London—anywhere on the Bakerloo, Piccadilly, District, or Victoria lines—you are forced into a multi-train subterranean safari:
* **South Kensington / Knightsbridge:** Dragging bags on the Piccadilly line to Green Park, changing to the Jubilee line to Canning Town, and changing again for the DLR. Two deep-level changes, three trains.
* **Covent Garden:** Taking the lift down to the Piccadilly line, fighting through Holborn to get onto the Central line, and then navigating the endless labyrinth at Bank down to the DLR.
* **Sloane Square:** Taking the District Line to Monument, then enduring the infamous, soul-crushing underground trek from the Monument platforms just to reach the Bank DLR platforms.
The 'easy public transport' narrative works beautifully for a solo corporate commuter with a slim laptop bag on a zero-change journey. But the moment you introduce 2 to 4 line changes through central bottlenecks like Holborn or Green Park with heavy luggage for a premium leisure trip or a long-haul connection, the Tube becomes a logistical nightmare.
That is exactly why more than a third of the airport abandons public transport and is forced into cars—which drops them right back into the unpredictable gridlock of Mayfair, Soho, and Holborn just trying to escape Central London to reach those Eastbound arteries.