Chase Sapphire Lounge by The Club at LaGuardia Airport [Review]

LaGuardia Airport’s been the butt of jokes in New York City for as long as anyone here can remember, from its too-short runways that seem to dare pilots to dip their toes in Flushing Bay to terminals that leave confused tourists wondering whether the airline had played a joke on them and left them stranded in a decrepit Midwestern bus terminal instead of introducing them to the majesty of the City That Never Sleeps.

But like the girl in the movies who takes off her glasses and becomes prom queen, LaGuardia’s suddenly getting all the right kind of attention. A much-needed makeover rebuild of the airport has made it arguably the chicest way to say goodbye to New York City.

And the jewel in the prom queen’s tiara? The new Chase Sapphire Lounge by The Club, which opened on January 16, 2024

Before I boarded a flight to Dallas with my kindergartener in tow, I made a point of going to LaGuardia Airport a couple of hours early on a Friday, even through a surprise earthquake, to check out the lounge every flyer in New York’s been talking about

Chase Sapphire Lounge by The Club Location

The main entrance to the Sapphire Lounge is in the east hall of the airside part of Terminal B of LaGuardia Airport (LGA), right at the point of The Elbow. If you’re familiar with LGA, you know exactly the sharp left turn I’m talking about: between the Centurion Lounge and the puzzlingly named Brooklyn Diner.

(LGA’s in the borough of Queens, and probably 95% of the tourists who come to LGA go straight to Manhattan. There are no Brooklyn Diners in Brooklyn. There are, however, 2 “Brooklyn” Diners in tourist-trap areas in Manhattan.)

On our visit, a pair of friendly lounge staff members were at the entrance to the Sapphire Lounge, welcoming people in. Or maybe it’s more accurate to call it the entrance to the entrance since this level was home merely to the elevators to the Sapphire Lounge.

When we arrived in the late morning, there was no wait to get in, but a line had formed by the time we left midday.

The elevators led down to a hallway that led to the actual reception desk, where attendants scanned my Priority Pass Select card (which I’d enrolled in through my Chase Sapphire Reserve^®) and welcomed us in. Noticing I had my young son with me, a woman at the desk personally led us to the family room, pointed out the fun stuff and QR codes for ordering delivery from the kitchen, and wished us a good stay.

Gaining Entry to the Sapphire Lounge

Chase Sapphire Reserve^®, J.P. Morgan Reserve Card, and The Ritz-Carlton™ Credit Card holders who’ve enrolled in Priority Pass get access to the Sapphire Lounge and can bring up to 2 guests for free as many times as they’d like throughout the year. Each additional guest costs $27, though Ritz-Carlton cardholders can bring in an unlimited number of guests for no additional charge.

Other Priority Pass members get 1 free visit to any Sapphire Lounge by the Club but must pay $75 for each subsequent visit that year. The exception is the Sapphire Lounge by the Club at Hong Kong International Airport (HKG), where vanilla Priority Pass members have unlimited access.

The Sapphire Lounge at LGA is open daily from 4:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Unless you have a connecting flight, you can enter the lounge up to 3 hours before your flight departs.

Hot Tip:

Want to learn more about what you can do with a Priority Pass membership? Read our full guide to the best Priority Pass lounges in the world!

First Impressions

If you’ve ever seen Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life,” you may remember the final scene, in which the Grim Reaper escorts a group of discombobulated guests from an unintentionally fatal dinner party through a pair of doors that lead to a massive dinner-theater restaurant. That place turns out to be a highly choreographed, lavishly gluttonous, beautifully backlit heaven.

Walking into the Sapphire Lounge at LGA was kind of like that, minus the musical number, Tom Jones impersonators, and Christmas-themed nudity.

There have been more than enough articles to go around, from the press preview and after, detailing the lounge’s effortless style, the amazingly effective recessed ceiling lighting, and design elements like the bottom-lit winding staircase that make seemingly every first-timer go “Wow.” But, yeah, they did a good job here.

The art was tasteful and “real” New York throughout — I didn’t see a single black-and-white city skyline photograph, yellow cab, Statue of Liberty, or floating hot dog the entire time I was here.

Though relegated to the empty elevator hallway upstairs, for example, a painting dominated the floor once you noticed it. It was by Matthew Kirk, an Arizona-born, Wisconsin-raised Navajo painter who now lives in Queens. And that’s about as New York as you can get.

However, there were no windows, meaning no apron views and no natural light. It wasn’t a big deal at first, as the lounge was ingeniously lit to make it seem light and airy rather than dark and cavernous. But as we neared the end of our third hour in the lounge, I found myself craving sunlight and open spaces, especially as the place started to fill up more.

Nothing in the lounge seemed to have been affected by the earthquake the area experienced while I was in the lounge besides staff and guests trading “I felt shaking” and “I didn’t feel a thing” earthquake stories.

For a complete walk-through of the lounge, check out the video tour below:

Seating

Main Lounge

The circular bar served as the hub from which the other sections of the lounge radiated. The staircase to the upper level coiled up gently behind the bar.

To one side was the buffet and buffet seating — mostly 2-tops and a couple of banquettes, but also an island counter with chairs.

Opposite that space was more leisurely seating, which had a healthy mix of seats — and lots of them. The infatuation with the lounge is real, though, and it became harder as the day wore on to find empty seats. (We arrived late morning and left a little past midday.)

Fireplace Lounge

Off the main area was a rectangular annex with a faux fireplace (orange LEDs and cool water vapor — of course my son immediately stuck his hand in to make sure) and an open side room with couches that seemed intended for small groups to take over.

The other side of the fireplace lounge had orange side-by-side couple loveseats, and I honestly can’t think of a better thing to call them except to fall back on old layout terms and describe them as parentheses where the layout designer had really messed up the kerning (I’m assuming to try to squeeze in 1 last classified ad).

They looked like they must’ve been a smash during the design stage but seemed really awkward to use in real life. They were too intimate to share with a stranger or coworker, but if you were sitting in them with your partner, family member, or close friend, wouldn’t it feel unsettling and unnatural to be facing opposite directions? Plus, only 1 side got a table.

There were open work booths and cubicles with doors around the Loneliest Loveseats in the World.

Family Room

In a corner of the lounge by the entrance was the family room, which featured banquette seating, soft ottomans, and a circular bench sheltered by a fake tree. The light in the family room was fairly dim and really yellow, for some reason. I suppose it was supposed to convey warmth.

There was a blue velvet curtain leading to the game room (on which more later). To one side was a playroom for toddlers and babies, a more brightly lit space happily decorated with upbeat retro banking posters and littered with foam blocks and toys. On the far wall, 2 pear-shaped nooks provided perches for parents to watch over their wee ones.

Once I could drag my kid away from the game room and family room, we naturally raced up the winding staircase to the second floor, which was mostly more armchairs circling a pillar sculpted like a tree trunk doing the mambo (as seen from behind).

Toward the front wall, the second floor led to an emergency exit, a pair of elevators, and the Reserve Suites.

This level also had great views of the action below.

That is, if people checking their phones, working on laptops, and feeding themselves buffet food is how you define “action.”

It was easy to find power outlets throughout the lounge, usually under benches or counters. They were frequent and spaced out evenly enough that there never seemed to be that awkward moment with your neighbor that feels as fraught with potential danger as staking a mining claim during the Gold Rush. Even the baby playroom had lots of underseat electrical outlets, which you can look at as a good or a potentially very bad thing.

Food and Beverage

Buffet

The buffet was well-stocked, with a good variety of choices that staffers constantly replenished. It was an open kitchen, so you could see the employees making the dishes, plating them, and filling empty spots with attractive ranks and files of foods on black or white ceramics.

There were 2 buffets arranged in an L, but it wasn’t a strict cold-hot split.

One had mostly cold dishes like fresh ricotta with basil and a strip of marinated red bell pepper; pesto burrata; flatbreads with muhammara; and the desserts.

This half of the buffet also had beet-and-apple salad and kale salad with smashed avocado — between the buffet and the à la carte delivery menu, I think vegetarians and vegans would’ve felt like they had a reasonable selection in this lounge, but I’ll defer to Upgraded Points contributor Ryan Smith‘s take when he comes through LGA.

The staff had done an admirable job of keeping the plates and bowls nice and neat and orderly, but all sugary hell had broken loose by the time we got to the desserts, which I blame on less-than-meticulous guests rather than the lounge employees. That’s what you get for working with confectioners sugar, I guess.

Standing guard over a corner was a mostly untouched bowl of oranges and individually wrapped green apples and 2 jars of biscotti (chocolate and almond).

The other side of the buffet had hot and cold foods, like salt cod brandade and Korean fried chicken alongside Caesar salads and steamed cauliflower with harissa.

I took a tray of buffet foods back to our encampment in the family room and tried a bite or 2 of each. The fresh ricotta was the winner, creamy without being cloying, a great base for the sweetness of the red pepper and the vaguely minty sharpness of the basil to play against.

The grilled cheese was visually gorgeous but a gustatory disappointment. I’m firmly in the camp that believes grilled cheese has to be fresh to be even decent, and this sandwich was cool and hard by the time I got to it. I couldn’t tell what kind of cheese was used at this point because it had turned to plastic, but I guessed it was a mild cheddar.

Plus, it had been drizzled in honey and had pistachios crumbled over it. Way too much was going on for a sandwich that’s all about its simplicity — had someone taken a dare to turn baklava into a luncheon main course? Granted, an airport lounge kitchen isn’t the place for short-order cooks, but if you’re going to have mediocre grilled cheeses, you should at least offer a hot, creamy tomato soup for diners to attempt to revive them with.

The salt cod brandade was unctuous but parsimoniously portioned once you dug through the Arrakis-sized dunes of toasted breadcrumbs. The cauliflower was … cauliflower.

To be transparent, I could only manage a couple of bites of the buffet foods because we’d already had a full lunch thanks to the lounge’s table service. (So, yes, I’m doing this kind of backwards, but people always seem to want the buffet stuff first.)

Table Service

Tables in the lounge were numbered and labeled with an associated QR code. Scanning the code on my phone brought up a made-to-order delivery menu with mostly fan-favorite dishes you couldn’t normally find at the buffet, like seared salmon and roast beef sandwiches, and at least 1 vegan and gluten-free dish of tofu with shirataki noodles.

I ordered a hamburger, which came with a tomato slice, lettuce, and fries. I was allowed to request a temperature for my burger … sort of. When I clicked on the burger line in the menu, a pop-up asked if I wanted my burger well done. I definitely didn’t (I’m usually a medium rare, rare, or even blue guy when it’s good meat), so I was careful not to check “well done,” which I suppose means I ordered my burger “not well done.”

It came well done.

But don’t get me wrong! It was still good — probably the best hamburger I’ve eaten within 1 mile of a commercial airplane.

The delivery wasn’t quick, and the other families in the room seemed to have been waiting longer than they’d expected, as well. It didn’t seem to be an issue just in the family room, either: Later, at the island counter near the buffet, a man asked everyone nearby if they wanted his roast beef sandwich whenever it was finally delivered since he was going to miss his flight if he kept waiting.

About 20 to 25 minutes after I’d ordered our lunches, at which point my son had tired of waiting and was off exploring nearby, the food came — and was delivered to the wrong family. Apparently, the tables had been moved around, and the server, working by memory, delivered to the table in our QR code’s usual place in the corner. It was all cleared up quickly, though.

So I had and enjoyed my burger. And my son ordered …

Actually, guess what my American-raised kindergartener wanted to eat. Go ahead, take a wild guess.

…

I’ll wait a couple more seconds for those without kids.

…

If you guessed my young child refused to each anything but chicken tenders, you can award yourself 10 UP Lounge Review points. (If you said, “chicken nuggets,” that counts, too.)

So my son ate 2 bites of 1 chicken tender, declared them “not good” and immediately disappeared into the arcade. I took a bite myself and agreed — they weren’t made from juicy, whole cuts of chicken breast but had that dry, gritty feel of reconstituted scraps of various dark and white meat. The breading, however, was thick and nicely crunchy.

The steak fries accompanying both my burger and his tenders were fine — not the best I’d ever had, but probably the best fries I’d had in an airport lounge. (Or airport, for that matter.) They were basically standard diner fries, which is usually a good thing. My son reappeared from the game room long enough to make those disappear.

Our food came with a separate saucer with a generous dab of ketchup. We’d ordered a chocolate chip brownie that arrived in its package and survived long enough for my son to share it with family in Texas. It was a decently moist and chocolatey packaged brownie, and not overpoweringly sweet.

Bar

I didn’t have a chance to really patronize the bar, which was fairly full during our midday visit.

Attentive bartenders watched over every quadrant of the counter, which was filled with lots of guys working on their laptops or tapping furiously on their phones.

When the lounge opened, Chase made a big deal of the bar’s menu being curated by Apotheke Chinatown, which is a real bar that New Yorkers actually go to and not a pretend place that’s just there to fool tourists at the airport into thinking they’re partaking of 1 last “authentic” experience. (I’m looking at you, “Brooklyn” Diner.) The bar serves the lounge’s signature cocktail, the Sapphire, made of gin or vodka with blueberry and goldenberry juices, lime, ginger, bee pollen, and spices.

But I didn’t have a drop to drink during this visit, because I was on dad duty. I didn’t order anything for myself from the bar, cocktail or not, but the bartender was quick to respond and helpful when I asked him to refill my kid’s “Moana” water bottle, and even put in ice.

Beverages

There were 2 drink counters in the lounge on opposite sides of the lounge: 1 by the buffet and the other in a screened-off corridor between the family and wellness rooms and the fireplace lounge. The counters had self-serve espresso machines and cold brew, fruit-infused waters, teabags, and bowls of fruit.

A knee-high minifridge held carbonated soft drinks, apple juice boxes, and flavored seltzer water.

Amenities

Arcade Room

As you might’ve guessed by now, we spent about half of our total time at the Sapphire Lounge in the game room, which you accessed via a “secret” corridor hidden by blue velvet curtains in the family room. It went almost entirely unused by anyone else almost our entire stay.

We amused ourselves with the tabletop shuffleboard-type game way longer than I would’ve expected, and the board was fairly well taken care of, though no one had swept the sand from the surface all day, apparently. There were no instructions or information about what the game was actually called (and no one we asked could agree on the name), but I just assumed it followed the fairly universal pétanque-type rules.

It took a while for my purely 21st-century child to wrap his mind around the idea that the only purpose of an appliance bigger than our oven was to play songs, and only some hundreds or a couple thousand of them, but he enjoyed watching the jukebox physically pick up and play the records. There were no instructions for how to use the odd number system to select or play records, so the music we got was essentially random. (It was almost all oldies.)

There was a small New York-themed pinball machine in the other corner, but it was out of order.

On a counter was a small rack with postcards with photos of the West Village. Though Terminal B does have mailboxes, these postcards didn’t come stamped, so it’s not like you could send a last merry “wish you were here” to friends at home for them to read weeks after you saw them again in person. (Unless you’re the kind of person who regularly works visits to local post offices into your vacations.) It wasn’t clear whether you could ask the front desk at the lounge to stamp and send these postcards for you, or, if they did, whether they would do so for both U.S. and international addresses.

Directly behind the velvet curtain from the family room was a photo booth, which we stepped through to get to the arcade proper.

Once the machine took our photos, I typed in my email address for the photo to be sent to me. It was a fun feature that entertained my son and other kids for longer than you’d think, but the photos we were emailed looked terrible and not at all like what we were shown on the screen — the fact that the only light was directly above and rather harsh made everything unflattering and weirdly lit, too, turning smiling visages into shadow-filled skull faces — if you fit in the frame. Suffice it to say my email account was soon clogged with badly lit photos of the top of my kindergartener’s head.

To say the arcade, indeed much of the lounge, was an exercise in nostalgia wouldn’t be wrong. The records (actual records!) were at least 40 or 50 years old, and all showed the creases and fading of artifacts from bygone eras.

More out of reach were replicas and designs that evoked an age when people flocked to the bright lights of the Great White Way and New York City was the broadcast capital of America, with big bands blasting dance tunes over radio waves when they weren’t dominated by tales of tough guys saying things to each other like, “See here, fella!”

Wellness Room

The QR codes at the table didn’t just bring up food menus — you could also reserve a time at a wellness room right down the corridor by the family room. The lounge offered free, 30-minute facial treatments with Face Haus products and a free Face Haus skincare travel kit.

Have you ever even attempted to persuade a 6-year-old boy to try or wait around while you tried a 30-minute facial for work? Neither have I.

But Upgraded Points News Managing Editor Stella Shon visited around the same time we did, and I’m sharing her photos of the wellness rooms here. Thanks, Stella!

The wellness rooms had their own check-in desk so that guests didn’t just walk into the rooms and start squirting glops of product on their faces and hair.

Wellness rooms featured reclining dentist-style chairs for clinicians to work on beautifying guests.

The room looked immaculate.

Stella managed to snap a photo of the wellness menu and available treatments, which made claims about doing various things to your hair, skin, lips … and, look, you might as well be talking to me about the extracellular matrix proteins in sea cucumbers, I’m so lost here.

Reserve Suites

The Reserve Suites were on the upper level and had their own reception desks. A kind woman told us the suites were already booked but that we would’ve had to reserve 72 hours ahead of time and shell out $2,200 to $3,000 for 3 hours.

Stella got inside a suite and took these photos, however, which I’ll try to explain like a guy who’s never left Michigan narrating a slideshow about the coming-of-age ceremonies of the Bembu people of Zambia.

According to Chase’s website, the Reserve Suites come with caviar service upon arrival, suites-only menus, suites-only wine selections, a TV, and private bathrooms and showers. (The rest of the lounge doesn’t have showers. Or caviar, for that matter.)

Apparently, each suite also has its own dining table, bar counter, and … miniature black hole set into the wall?

Oh, hey! It’s the TV!

Apparently, the suites are well-kept and have some sort of circle theme throughout.

My biggest gripe with the lounge as a whole was that there were no showers for “regular” lounge guests. That wouldn’t be an issue for Reserve Suites guests, of course, but is $2,200 really worth it for a shower? Even if you took a 3-hour shower? That’d be $733.33 per hour for vertical hot water!

They did have rainfall showerheads, though.

The Sapphire Lounge couldn’t have you refresh yourself with a nice, hot shower only to dry off by shaking yourself like a shaggy dog, could it? Towels and robes were, of course, included.

Also, there were lotions and serums and the like.

And more skin stuff. Sea cucumbers, man. Sea cucumbers.

Wi-Fi

The Sapphire Lounge had fast Wi-Fi that was strong throughout the space, though I wasn’t able to crack open a laptop or run a speed test while I was there. I will note that there were many, many people working on their laptops during our visit, seemingly without issue.

Bathrooms

The bathroom at the Sapphire Lounge was clean but relatively bare-bones. It had large stalls but no extra amenities like toothbrushes, disposable razors, or cologne, and there wasn’t an attendant.

Who uses those big bottles of public bathroom cologne, anyway? What’s the story behind how that became a thing the people who stocked public restrooms thought might be a good idea?

The handicapped stall was large, and the walls and doors, though they didn’t go all the way down to the floor, were at least ankle height and not knee height, so you got a sense of a little more privacy than in most public lavatories.

When we went, it’d apparently been a while since it had been tended to. It was clean, but the toilet paper was hanging loose.

Staff and Service

The lounge staff seemed genuinely excited, aware that they were representing possibly the best lounge in New York (maybe even the U.S.), and proud of that fact. You could even see the difference between their faces and postures and those of the more resigned, tired-looking employees checking IDs in front of last generation’s prom queen, the Centurion Lounge, right next door.

The servers were friendly and, though the food didn’t come quickly, were helpful and cleared plates regularly. The staff were mostly proactive about making guests’ stays more pleasant. The kitchen staff quickly made and replaced buffet dishes. The front desk staff immediately ascertained our particular needs as a travel group (1 parent, little kid, bored quickly) and personally took us where we needed to be. (And she was spot on because my son didn’t want to leave “our” spot for a long, long time.)

But it was the staff’s palpable excitement at being front and center at an airport’s A-plus product that really shone through. We’ll have to see if that enthusiasm wears down once the scuff marks begin to show, but at least for now, it’s infectious and made us as feel as keen to experience all the lounge had to offer as they were to share it.

Bottom Line:

The Sapphire Lounge by The Club at LaGuardia Airport is really, really nice, and lives up to the hype it’s been getting — at least for now. Based on my experience here, eligible cardholders and Priority Pass members should be very excited for Chase to bring more lounges online.

Final Thoughts

I liked the Sapphire Lounge by The Club at LaGuardia Airport. I liked it a lot. And my kindergartener liked it, too — he was still talking about it hours after we’d landed in Dallas. Prioritizing this lounge is clearly a no-brainer when you’re traveling through Terminal B. The layout is intuitive and uncramped, the aesthetic is tasteful, and the food (and its timing) could use tweaks, but it isn’t half bad.

It’s always great during a grueling layover to know there are clean showers you can take without dipping into your wallet, and this lounge definitely doesn’t have those. Natural light and actual windows are always a plus, but the Sapphire Lounge seems to have cannily designed around its deficits, so you don’t really notice for a couple of hours.

All in all, the Sapphire Lounge by The Club may just be the new lounge to beat in the U.S.