The American Airlines Dallas Flagship Lounge Surprised Me—Better Food And Made-To-Order Dinner In 4 Minutes

I flew from Austin to Dallas – Fort Worth for American’s media preview flight of its refurbished Boeing 777-300ER last week. The plane features its new business class suites – 70 of them! – as well as new premium economy and coach cabins. As is my practice, I made a charitable donation for more than the value of what I received. There’s no market value for the flight. You can’t buy a seat on a media preview flight. But they do price first class between Dallas and New York. I was spending the night before the event at the Grand Hyatt DFW, which is in terminal D. I headed over to D but stopped at the American Airlines Flagship Lounge first. My Royal Jordanian Gold SPARROW status lets me enter the lounge even on U.S. domestic flights, and even on arrival. I just pull up the Royal Jordanian app, show them my account number, and they enter it – I don’t need to swap out my AAdvantage number for lounge access. Royal Jordanian isn’t a common one that agents see, and since there’s a two-letter code drop down box they need to enter, I just smile and let them know it’s “RJ” I had landed in the low B terminal and walked over to D rather than taking the Skylink. Along the way I noticed the Lavazza coffee shop. That’s actually smart placement given their partnership with American Airlines. Lavazza is trying to gain traction in the U.S. market, so partnering with an airline and showing up at their home airport helps gain brand awareness. Once inside the lounge I skipped past the Bollinger display at the entrance. Even though it was around 5 p.m. when I arrived, right before the transatlantics, the lounge wasn’t super crowded. It was a Tuesday. Later in the week the place would certainly be packed. I headed over to the buffet area, because just past it is the dining room where you’ll find QR codes on tables to order from American’s new sit down dining concept and I hadn’t tried it in Dallas yet. It was good! I wish they offered this throughout the lounge, but limiting it to a specific seating area keeps volume manageable for the kitchen and keeps costs down, too. What I wasn’t expecting was to find the overall level of the food presentation to be much better than even a few weeks ago. I didn’t get to visit First Dining on this visit. I could have redeemed miles for that, and perhaps I should have because the truly unique experience there will be going away as they opened it up to all of their business class passengers. (It’ll still likely be good, but no longer a refuge.) However, The buffet itself was higher quality The charcuterie presentation was improved, because it was staffed which kept it from becoming a mess as passengers picked over it The chef action station was still there (I honestly expected them to eliminate this with new QR-code ordering) The prepared seafood crepes were better than what I’ve had there recently And the made-to-order items brought to my table were pretty good quality, and delivered in four minutes. After enjoying ‘dinner’ I grabbed a couple of cans of water for the night, figuring those would add to the couple the Grand Hyatt would give me and I’d be all set. I walked out of Flagship and down to the concourse, out the exit and up the escalator to the Grand Hyatt lobby. Nobody was ahead of me at check-in around 6 p.m. I’ve always had good luck with this property. They had me in a runway view room, which is great, I don’t need a suite when it’s just me and only for a night. Nonetheless I asked anyway. And they had two standard suites available. Neither one was runway view, though. They happily moved me to one. It’s a good reminder that if you care at all, don’t just assume that they’ve assigned all the suites, or that you’ve been given the best room available. (Or that they know what you’ll consider to be best.) Ask for what you want, the worst thing they can say is no. The Grand Hyatt had coffee available starting at 3 a.m. I’m an early riser but that’s before even I was up. I’m grateful for hotels that make that happen. I had my coffee and was out front of the hotel at 7:45 a.m. for the bus over to our charter flight (and pre-flight talks by American, Boeing and July Luggage which did a 100th anniversary American Airlines roll-aboard). American’s Flagship Lounges have been around for a decade. They rolled out at the same time United first introduced Polaris lounges, and long before Delta One lounges. They’ve been available to far more passengers and for much longer (premium transcon business class passengers, American and oneworld mid-tier elite passengers flying coach internationally even). But they haven’t had sit down dining – that was something reserved for First Dining in some locations. But American seems to be upping its ground game. The best lounge is still the one that’s least busy, though the quality of Delta One lounges in a vaccuum exceeds that of American’s or United’s business lounges. But the gap between DFW Flagship and better lounges is less than it was even a few weeks back, and many more passengers will get to experience Flagship Dining at DFW, Miami and when LAX re-opens later this year. Topics on this page