Travelers connecting through the Lufthansa mega-hub at Frankfurt have a new lounge option to look forward to if they’re in the A gates wing of the building, with the “Panorama Lounge operated by Lufthansa” adding capacity for business class passengers heading to Europe’s Schengen common travel area destinations.
It’s not huge, with a quick eyeballing of the number of chairs in the sunlit media snaps suggesting space for somewhere between 70 and 80 passengers to sit in comfort, and with substantially more personal space than in the rest of the Lufthansa Business lounges.
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The floor to ceiling windows will be great for passengers wanting to use natural daylight to reset their body clock, or for those of us who enjoy relaxing while watching the giant fishbowl that is a major terminal apron. And it has the possibility of being a hidden diamond in the Frankfurt rough.
Lufthansa now technically has eight Business lounges in Frankfurt’s departures area: at gates A13, A26, B24, B44, Z50 (non-Schengen), two direct boarding lounges that cover gates C14-16, and now the Panorama lounge.
All the older lounges are the rather soullessly corporate Lufthansa beige-grey-white standard, so the change of décor in the Panorama lounge to something a bit more modern and interesting is welcome.
Unlike most airlines, Lufthansa provides a better class of lounge — the Senator lounges — to its frequent flyers (and to their Star Alliance Gold counterparts, as well as non-Lufthansa Group partner carriers’ first class passengers) than it does to paying business class passengers in the form of its Business lounges.
Notably, the addition of the Panorama lounge adds a useful amount of capacity to Lufthansa’s bread-and-butter short-haul routes, but only for weekdays: Lufthansa says the lounge is only open from 0600 to 2100 Mondays through Fridays.
The airline has an existing Business lounge at the corner where the A pier turns, just across the hall from the Panorama lounge, and your regularly Lufthansa-flying journalist can confirm that the Business lounge is frequently overcrowded.
“I am delighted that by renting the Panorama Lounge we can once again offer our lounge guests the service they have come to expect from us,” promises Andreas Otto, Lufthansa Group Product Manager for Premium Airlines, who is also the Chief Commercial Officer for Austrian Airlines.
Otto also spruiks some work that is nebulous enough to sound promising, while not really promising very much: “In addition, we have planned several further renovation and expansion measures in the lounge area at our Frankfurt hub, which will further improve the lounge experience for our guests.”
Hopefully, this involves some rationalization of the lounge estate, as well as some major facelifts.
The Panorama style “initially differs from the usual Lufthansa design”, says Lufthansa, which leads one to suspect that there are refit plans afoot. It’ll be interesting to see whether there is an update to the corporate Lufthansa look and feel.
It wouldn’t be a bad thing if the Panorama lounge’s design rubbed off on the new yellow-less Lufthansa. I really like the variety of textures in the space, as well as of course the amount of natural light, although of course cooling spaces like this in the summer is a challenge.
Unfortunately, the provisions of a modern lounge appear to be a little lacking. The three low rectangular tables adjacent to the buffet area offering two power outlets each, not enough for the four chairs around them, are the only visible power sockets in the lounge.
In an era when travelers need to charge phones, tablets, laptops, headphones and more, Lufthansa (and other airlines worldwide) will need to figure out how it meets this need.
