American Airlines will open a new, expanded Admirals Club on the L concourse at Chicago O’Hare. Their main Admirals Club and Flagship lounge are both at H/K, and there’s a Concoure G club as well.
This L club will go from worst to first, as it grows to 10,000 square feet and takes on the new design aesthetic that American has rolled out to places like Washington National (E Concourse), Denver, Newark and Philadelphia (A West).
The lounge is after security, before Gate L1. And it’s really just currently a sad room and a four seat conference room and a bar. If memory serves this used to be the old Delta Sky Club that American took over a decade ago. It’s the smallest of American’s Chicago clubs, more or less non-descript industrial but with plenty of natural light (roadway, nut runway, views) and very few power outlets. Still, it’s a convenient place to sit near the L gates and usually calm.
Eventually I’d expect to see a new American lounge open in the future O’Hare Global Terminal – sometime in the mid-2030s. But it’ll be really nice to see this L-gate upgrade in the meantime. And it’s clearly part of American’s renewed commitment to compete at the airport. With capital spending on lounge, $30 million for two of Spirit’s gates and a rebuild of their schedule to return to pre-pandemic volumes, the airline was shaken out of its complacency by losing gates to United in the airport’s (premature) gate reallocation scheme.
American Airlines Flagship Lounge at H/K
View From American Airlines H/K Admirals Club
They’re the underdog against United Airlines, which has a bigger presence and has vowed to drive them out. But the airport has also become a rallying cry that shows American still has fight left in them which is great to see.
American needs to be competitive in Chicago because of its importance as a credit card spending market, especially after having lost ground in New York and Los Angeles and seeing its Citi cobrand go from number one in airline credit card spend volumes down to number three.
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