No Club Europe Lounge. Worth complaint?

[BH]

I flew in CE from Palermo to Heathrow a couple of days ago. At check in I asked about the lounge location only to be told that there wasn’t one due to building works. (Why a mainly seasonal destination does such works in high season is for another discussion.)

As lounge access is sold as one of the benefits of CE, is it worth asking BA to cough-up for a couple of sandwiches and coffee purchased at the (chaotic) airport bar?

[PeteM]

Complain and they may give you 10k Avios, that’s about it.

[NorthernLass]

European lounges aren’t much to write home about – you might not even have got a sandwich in there – but you would definitely get 10k avios pp for complaining to BA. I have a feeling lounge is “subject to availability” so you can complain that the one you should have been able to use is out of action, but not if there isn’t a lounge at all, or BA has no agreement with one.

[LD27]

Figari last weekend. Small airport. No lounge. Might send an email.

[executiveclubber]

Agree. I would complain as it’s hard to know which airports do and don’t have lounges for the average punter, and even then they can be subpar.

Separate note – does complaining about stuff like this often get you a strike on your account? I run up against issues with BA that are rightly worth noting, quite often, but I do worry about bothering to submit a complaint in case they blacklist me 😶

[NorthernLass]

It’s very easy to find out if an airport has a One World lounge – just search on https://www.oneworld.com/airport-lounges

If there’s no lounge, there’s not really any grounds for complaint. Otherwise I’d complain every time we fly back from GCM. (They used to give you a $15 voucher for Subway but even that’s gone post-pandemic, so I think they’d just ignore any claim!)

[Reeferman]

I flew back from Palermo (BA – Club Class) a couple of weeks ago.
Quite possibly the worst European airport I’ve flown from for years: maybe ever! Dirty, building works everywhere, poor/mo signage, no lounge, an awful cafe that was rammed (and as dirty as the rest of the airport).
I didn’t complain to BA – just put it down to experience (and a mental note to fly from Catania next time!)

[BH]

Follow-up: I asked for the ~€25 I spent to be reimbursed, but was given 10k Avios (each) for both of us.

(@NorthernLass: Palermo airport did have a lounge listed when I made the booking, it just didn’t exist when I got to the airport. The listing now says ‘Temporarily Closed’. That was my complaint – I wouldn’t have bothered if I wasn’t expecting one!)

[Alex G]

Always worth complaining. Expect to wait weeks for a response though. Two weeks since I submitted a complaint about my request for a refund for duty free goods that were not delivered to my seat, and no response yet.

[BH]

Mine took almost exactly three weeks, which I think is reasonable in high season.

EDIT: Actually, I am doing them wrong: my case was with them for exactly 10 days.