Review: Atlantic Lounge Munich Airport (MUC) Terminal 1

Since I don’t have Star Alliance Gold status (gasp), my only “free” option for lounge access was through Priority Pass Select. But the Priority Pass-eligible lounge at the Munich airport is in Terminal 1, and I was transiting through Terminal 2 since I was flying Lufthansa. I had read that it was possible to walk between the two terminals, so I figured that I’d wander around during my layover and hope that I could make my way to Terminal 1, and if I couldn’t, I’d likely resort to standing around forlornly in front of the Senator Lounge and hoped that a kind soul would want to guest me in.

After deplaning my first flight (which was a Schengen flight since it came from Athens), I followed the signs to transfer to different gates until I came across an escalator that took me a to a waiting area for a bus that’s supposed to be a terminal transfer bus. The bus comes every 15 minutes, but it doesn’t seem like it’s used very often. I waited around until the bus came, and in this case, the bus driver has to get off the bus to fetch passengers who want to transfer terminals.

The bus driver asked me what airline I was flying, and I had no idea which airlines flew out of Terminal 1, so I instead just said, “lounge?” After showing him my phone with the Priority Pass page up for the Atlantic Lounge, he understood what I was talking about, and let me onto the bus.

A short drive later, and I was dropped off at a non-descript entrance. And walking up the stairs kinda felt like I was in the wrong place since Terminal 2 was crawling with people while this part of Terminal 1 was empty. But the bus driver had told me to just go up the stairs and walk around, so I did. And I found signs to lead me to the Atlantic Lounge.

In order to get to the Atlantic Lounge, however, I had to clear immigration since it’s technically in a non-Schengen area. The immigration officer asked me how long I was planning on staying in Germany (“2 hours?”) and generally wondered aloud if I had any idea what I was doing (“You do know that you’re flying out of Terminal 2, right?”), but let me on my merry way to the lounge after stamping my passport.

To get to the lounge itself, you need to go down a hallway and take an elevator to a lower floor. And it seems like it’s not a very busy lounge as I was the only person when I arrived, and when I left, there were hardly 10 people in the lounge.

The lounge was quite nice, with a couple of different seating areas (and even a smoking lounge, if you need that).

My first order of business was to ask for a shower, and although there’s only one shower room, it’s quite nice. There’s a waterfall shower head with good water pressure and temperature control, the shower room was quite large (it seems like it was made for two people?), and it was kept immaculately clean.

After showering, I checked out the food and drink offerings, and although there wasn’t any hot food available, the cold food offerings were pretty good for what they were. I was mostly just happy that they had small packages of Nutella, and the kiwis they had were actually pretty ripe and tasty.

After a couple of hours in the lounge, I made my way back to Terminal 2 to catch my flight to the US. This involved taking another bus that seems very rarely used, being dropped off somewhere where it seems like I don’t belong, and generally feeling like I’m doing something wrong.

Upon orienting myself in Terminal 2, I found that I didn’t need to clear immigration again, and I just had to go through the most invasive security check I’ve ever been through to get to the gates for flights departing for the US. After walking through the metal detector, a man used his wand in ways that I imagine are most often found at the beginnings of bad porn movies, and a woman searched every pocket of my bag and looked through the pictures on my camera. Although the security screening didn’t take very long, I definitely missed the TSA and their grope massages! (Seriously, just because a guy is using a wand instead of his hands does not mean he should be able to stick it in your privates)

Anyway, back to the lounge review: The Atlantic Lounge is a pretty good lounge, and it’s definitely worth the detour if you don’t otherwise have lounge access and you’re transiting through Terminal 2, assuming that you have a couple of hours to kill. The food options are pretty good for only having cold items, and the shower room was great.