Lufthansa First Class Terminal FRA Review

by Stephen

One Last Suites Hurrah — A Week in Central Europe via Singapore Suites and Lufthansa First

  1. Introduction and Booking
  2. Singapore Suites Check-in JFK and Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse
  3. Singapore Airlines Suites Class JFK-FRA and FRA EasyPass Enrollment
  4. 36 Hours in Prague and Czech Airlines PRG-BUD Review 
  5. Budapest, BUD Priority Pass Lounge, and Lufthansa Intra-Europe Business Class Review
  6. Lufthansa First Class Porsche Rental
  7. Lufthansa First Class Terminal FRA Review
  8. Lufthansa First Class FRA-JFK Review

After introducing herself and her colleague who would be taking my Porsche rental back to Avis, the lounge agent/”personal assistant” who would be assisting me led me through the entrance to the First Class Terminal to security. I was quickly through and, as is standard for passengers at the FCT, the agent took my passport to hold onto and gave me a printed boarding pass. She welcomed me again and said that she would come to get me when my flight was about to board.

The Lufthansa First Class Terminal is of course one of the hallmark must-dos for any points/miles enthusiast and has been extensively reviewed many times. As a quick recap, the lounge is actually not that large (though it never feels crowded), and has several areas with various chairs and tables for seating, a dining area with table service and both a buffet and made-to-order a la carte options, sleeping rooms, rooms with showers and one with a bathtub, a smoking lounge, and my favorite feature, a bar with an extensive single malt scotch collection.

a hallway with white pillars a room with a tv and chairs people in a room a bar with many bottles of alcohola group of colorful objects on a tablea glass door in a room a room with chairs and a screen a room with couches and a coffee table a room with chairs and a table a room with a couch and a coffee table

a list of alcohol in a paper

Page 1 of several of the single malt selection

a menu with a drink on it

For those who are particular about their water…

I decided to start with a quick bite and grabbed a table in the dining area. As I was going to be at the FCT for about five hours, I knew I’d likely eat again later and opted just for the buffet for the time being. The selection was pretty decent, with a couple of hot Indian, Chinese, and Western options, as well as a little charcuterie section off to the side.

a menu with text on ita table with meat and scissorsa table with food on it

I sampled a bit of each of the hot items and found the quality of the food to be very good and better than I remembered from my previous visits. Service, however, was a bit disappointing. I was approached by a server when I first sat down and I asked for a glass of water. No one came back to my table the entire time I was there, and I never got that water.

Having woken up very early in the morning for my BUD-FRA flight, I was pretty tired and decided to take a nap after my meal. There are a couple of sleeping rooms at the FCT, and they can be reserved on a first-come, first-served basis. I was able to snag one with no wait and, after grabbing a glass of Glenfiddich 21 at the bar and reserving a bath for later, took about a 90-minute nap.

I slept soundly but upon waking up immediately realized something was off. I felt feverish and more tired than I was before my nap, and had muscle aches all over. Initially I wasn’t sure what was wrong, but after having some stomach issues not long after I left the sleeping room, I realized that I likely had food poisoning. Given that I had only eaten twice during the time period that would have accounted for my symptoms and one meal was at a well-regarded restaurant in Budapest where nothing seemed unclean, I realized that I must have gotten something from the quick bite I had at the BUD Platinum lounge early that morning.

I spent the next forty-five minutes or so writhing uncomfortably in a chair at the far corner of the lounge. I happened to be texting a friend and hilariously he immediately identified the culprit — the chicken schnitzel ball skewer in the lounge at BUD — as he had succumbed to the same dish in the same lounge previously. So I suppose if there’s one important take-home point from this whole trip report, it would be to avoid eating at the BUD Platinum Lounge…

Just when I needed it the most, the time for my bath/shower came and I relaxed with a soothing bath followed by a shower. While my bath was great, the water temperature in the shower wasn’t very good and the lukewarm/borderline cold water of the shower combined with the chills I had made for a pretty miserable shower.

a bathroom with a sink and a bathtub

At this point there was about an hour and a half until my flight. With my symptoms getting worse, I knew that I’d be more or less incapacitated for my flight, and so I decided to go out with a proverbial bang and enjoy the time I had left. Knowing that it wasn’t the best thing to be doing in my condition, I had another glass of Glenfiddich at the bar. The friendly bartender saw me eyeing the scotch selection and asked if I wanted to do a tasting. I seriously considered saying yes for a minute, before regretfully declining. I followed up the single malt with more food — opting for the schnitzel off the a la carte menu. The irony of ordering schnitzel after I had just gotten food poisoning from schnitzel earlier that morning didn’t occur to me until later.

a plate of food on a counter

I spent the rest of my time in the lounge catching up on email and sipping a final glass of Glenfiddich 21 and — I couldn’t help myself — a glass of champagne.

a table with a glass of water and food on it

About an hour before boarding for my flight, the lounge attendant who checked me in came around to let me know that her shift was over and to introduce me to a different attendant who would be getting me for my flight. About thirty minutes later, the new attendant came to get me and another passenger who was on my flight. We took the elevator down to the first floor, where we quickly cleared exit immigration and were escorted to the Porsche Cayenne that would be taking us to our plane.

Even though I’ve been lucky enough to have gotten one numerous times, Lufthansa tarmac transfers at FRA are always an awesome experience. I’m particularly enamored with Lufthansa’s crisp livery, and getting to see all of the widebody action from up close is a real treat for any aviation geek.

two men in a car

Lufthansa Porsche tarmac transfer

a plane on the tarmaca plane parked in a terminal

We arrived at our plane within a few minutes and were escorted up the elevator to the jetbridge. While up until this point I didn’t feel great but was still relatively functional, I started feeling really terrible as I boarded the plane.

SUMMARY

The Lufthansa First Class Terminal at FRA remains one of the top ground experiences for first class passengers. The lounge offers solid amenities and a good food/beverage selection, and the ground handling, from personal assistants to tarmac transfers, is very good. I spent about five and a half hours in the lounge, having built in an extra long layover for my Porsche rental. Granted, I was succumbing to the early stages of food poisoning for much of time in the lounge and didn’t get to have as much fun as I was hoping, but I’d say that 4-5 hours in the lounge is more than enough time to be able to enjoy everything.

 

The responses below are not provided or commissioned by the bank advertiser. Responses have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by the bank advertiser. It is not the bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.

Related Articles

6 comments

henry LAX June 22, 2017 - 11:30 am

ahhh Glenfiddich 21 … i see you’re a true connoisseur =)

Reply
Charles NOT MD June 22, 2017 - 2:56 pm

I am not a physician and nothing I say should be relied upon.
I am waiting for an update on your health concern. if I am correct, true “food Poisoning” comes with fever, lasts at least a day or two and takes at least 24 hours after the suspect cause. Other possibilities are coincidental virus or some food that you can not digest properly. Both can cause symptoms but would not be called food poioning. If you truly had food poioning it might have been prudent to check into a hotel, grab some gatoraid and wait a day or two.

Reply
Stephen June 22, 2017 - 5:40 pm

Hi Charles, thanks for the comment and for your concern.

I actually am a physician, and while you’re correct in that many cases of food poisoning aka gastroenteritis take about a day or so to manifest, it’s not uncommon for symptoms to present earlier than that. I ate in the BUD Platinum lounge around 3-4 AM and first starting feeling not so great about 10 hours later. Not to detract from the main focus of this post, but to answer your question I ended up getting progressively worse with all of the hallmark symptoms of gastroenteritis and ultimately it took me about a week to fully recover; given that there was nothing else more likely on my differential, I just went ahead and self-diagnosed myself with gastroenteritis.

As the vast majority of gastroenteritis diagnoses (including mine) are “clinical” diagnoses, i,e., diagnosed based solely on history/physical without needing any objective laboratory or imaging data, you’re absolutely not wrong in suggesting that this may have been something else and indeed it’s not unreasonable to believe that some people who are told they have gastroenteritis may actually have something else. That said, I was fairly early in the course of the food poisoning when I boarded my flight to JFK and felt that I was experiencing mild/moderate rather than severe symptoms. You’re certainly right that it may have been a good idea to drink lots of fluids and put my trip on hold, but having suffered through worse before I figured I’d be able to tough it out — I did make sure to drink plenty of water on my flight though, and quickly decimated my friend’s Powerade stash when I got to his apartment in New York. If in FRA I had felt the way I did when I was in the car from JFK into the city, I probably would have opted not to fly.

Reply
Lufthansa First Class FRA-JFK B747-8i Review - Point Me to the Plane June 27, 2017 - 8:08 am

[…] Lufthansa First Class Terminal FRA Review […]

Reply
Trip Report: Lufthansa First Class FRA-JFK B747-8i Review - Point Me to the Plane June 27, 2017 - 12:07 pm

[…] Lufthansa First Class Terminal FRA Review […]

Reply
Budapest, BUD Priority Pass Lounge, and LH J BUD-FRA - Point Me to the Plane August 10, 2017 - 7:18 pm

[…] the warm dishes, some sort of chicken schnitzel ball on a skewer. As I’ll discuss in an upcoming post, I would pay for this dearly […]

Reply

Leave a Comment