Lounge Review: Skyteam joint lounge @ LHR T4
Hi guys! Ive missed travel blogging and you. Today, the husband and I flew from Heathrow to Amsterdam on KLM, and it was my first trip in over 2 years to the joint Skyteam lounge at Heathrow from Terminal 4. If case any of you are ever on Jeopardy, the now joint Skyteam lounge at LHR in T4 used to house the Concorde Room, along with a direct stairway from the lounge to the tarmac and the Concorde. The thought of using miles to fly from New York or Washington to London in under 4 hours still makes me drool.
I’ll start out by saying that anyone who has been to Heathrow T4 in years since Concorde knows how bad that terminal became. British Airways let it almost look like LaGuardia, since they had T5 open and didn’t want to spend money on what was soon to be the Skyteam home at Heathrow. Now that it is Skyteam’s London home, and all Skyteam flights (with the exception of some Delta flights that depart from T3 to connect easily with Virgin Atlantic flights), the Lounge definitely gets good use. It is also convenient to most of the gates in T4, and has a kind of cool/ innovative inside wall garden/ green wall. The only other place I have seen that in the travel world is the Standard hotel in LA, where cacti “grow” outward from the walls. The lounge bar area, while small, is decently bright even without windows and is stocked with a decent selection of drinks. However, the lunch food selections were pretty awful. Anyone want plain pasta that has been sitting out for a few hours, but without tomato sauce? Or how about what used to be turkey bathed in some type of salt water solution, except we’ve run out of turkey… for the last 30 minutes. Or how about some type of lamb concoction that just looking at made my stomach turn.
Sky team can and should do better. They claim this is a joint lounge at Heathrow, a market they are trying to compete in against some carriers with amazing offerings. Even in the same Terminal 4, Etihad and Qatar have their own lounges, and something tells me they aren’t serving hour old food at best or at worse, Christmas dinner without turkey a few days late. And how has a former Concorde room lounge at Heathrow become a place where I soon expect flies to start buzzing around the buffet line? Aside from the food though, which I hope Skyteam does improve, the lounge does have potential. The plant wall/ garden and bar areas are cool. Have any of you fellow travelers been through LHR T4 recently? What do you guys think?
