Please report back how you get on.
Will do! I am still waiting on travellerqff to respond and xfer the pass.
I'm going to attempt F lounge entry anyway. I always attempt to. Before I was a frequent flyer, I always had various tricks regarding lounge access. A while back when some of the DOM lounges (incl J) had separate entrance and exit doors, I would simply wait until people walked out the sliding doors at the exit and get in that way. Used to work a treat in SYD. When I began to fly more frequently (but not frequently enough,) I bought a QP membership, which I haven't had to renew due to Gold status. Another trick I have used (especially when travelling on an A330,) is checking the J cabin on the way out to see if anybody had left their boarding pass at their seat. This happened to me when I flew CNS-MEL via SYD. Sure enough, I found a boarding pass in the J cabin and used it to get into the J lounge in SYD whilst waiting for my flight back to MEL. The last time I travelled domestically was last Thursday, and I went up the J lounge escalator and politely asked the gentleman behind me if I could be his guest in the lounge. He didn't even know that you were allowed to do this.... I explained to him that I was QFF Gold and wanted to sit down and have a meal instead of a **** sandwich in the QP. He thought that Gold FF's could get into J lounge and agreed that if I was unsuccessful, he would guest me in, which he did. The SYD J lounge is a ****hole. If I personally paid for all my travel and was P/P1/J I would be very unsatisfied with the state of that lounge. People refer the Qantas Club to the Qantas Pub, but let me tell you, the J lounge in SYD was as sloppy as it gets. People dropping food all over the place when serving themselves, (Admittedly there wasn't much to serve.) J lounge in SYD is a debacle now, and when people arrive into a lounge with food droppings all over the place they are more inclined to be just as sloppy.
On one occasion, I flashed my Gold FF card at the BNE J lounge (Which I am a HUGE fan of) and they waved me through, and another time I was upgraded to J on CNS-MEL via BNE so that obviously worked and that day I had the tastiest doughnuts I've ever put in my mouth.
They are a LOT stricter regarding this type of strategy at MEL J lounge as it is new. The new J lounge isn't all that different to the QP esp in the early morning. That being said, the new QF lounges at MEL is a typical Alan Joyce/QF move. I'm talking about the fact that there are no airside views from the QP. This is class warfare at its finest. Qantas wanted to tell its non J/P/P1 pax that your lounge experience must be worse in every single way, and on top of this we are going to defeat the purpose of one of the key reasons why folks buy lounge memberships in the first place, which is to relax whilst looking out onto the apron. Admittedly the QP in BNE doesn't have apron views either.
To finish, the best free lounge experience I've ever had was at the Star Alliance Gold lounge at LAX/TBIT. At that point, I was a Bronze QFF with a QP membership but was flying AirNZ back to Australia. I had no status, no credentials. I didn't belong. However, it happened to be my Birthday.
It took about an hour of a perfect balance of assertiveness and passivity but they allowed me in.
Love that lounge. Love the Vietnamese noodle bar, the spaciousness, plenty of USB and charging stations. Showers were excellent and so too is the outdoor terrace with the view of all the aircraft on finals into LAX. That lounge is a real treat and I had 4 hours until boarding began.
I shoot for the stars, often in these situations you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
QF London Lounge at LHR would be my 3rd favourite after the QF FIRST lounge in MEL, which I bull****ted my way into.
Will keep you in the loop, hopefully, travellerqff will log on to check his/her messages and be kind enough to xfer it!
BTW, how did you get on with the F lounge passes that you were gifted? Have you used them yet?
Thanks for the interest!
