Gatwick lounges: every lounge and every way in

Twelve airside lounges work Gatwick, six in each terminal, and they sort cleanly by how you get in. Nine sell entry to anyone with a boarding pass, whichever airline it names. The other three belong to airlines: British Airways runs two lounges in the South Terminal and Emirates one in the North, and those doors open for the right cabin or status rather than a card payment. A separate arrivals product, a private room with a shower at the Sofitel, covers the other end of the trip. The table runs the nine bookable lounges with each operator's own starting price.

Operator-direct starting prices and hours. Prices move with demand and differ by booking channel; the airline lounges and the arrivals room are covered further down.

Three names repeat because one operator dominates. No1 Lounges runs the No1, My Lounge and Clubrooms brands at both terminals plus Club Aspire at South, so seven of the nine bookable rooms come from one company at three price points: casual, standard and table service. Plaza Premium Group runs the other two, both at North. The character differences are real, and they decide who should book what, so the terminal sections below take each lounge in turn.

A Gatwick lounge day pass is a single-visit ticket: you book a date and an entry time, turn up airside, and stay up to three hours before your flight with food, drinks and wifi included. Three hours is the standard across all nine lounges. The No1 Lounges family sells extra hours in advance if you want to settle in earlier, and booking direct with that operator adds delay cover, which keeps your seat until the flight actually leaves rather than until the clock runs out. Infants under two go free at the No1-family lounges and Plaza Premium; Clubrooms takes no one under 12.

Two official channels sell the same rooms, and their prices disagree more than you would expect. On the day this page was researched, the airport's own lounge booking page listed No1 from £38, My Lounge from £34, Plaza Premium from £40 and Plaza Express from £28, all below the operators' own floors, while Club Aspire ran the other way (£36 against £34 direct). The gaps reach £8 a head, which on a family of four pays for breakfast. Check both No1 Lounges' own site and the airport page before paying, and for the North Terminal pair compare Plaza Premium's Gatwick pages too.

Walk-ups work when there is space: the desk sells entry like any till. Space is the catch. School holidays and the early-morning departure banks fill lounges to their booking caps, and a full lounge turns walk-ups away first, so on the dates you most want a calm corner, only a pre-booked slot guarantees one. Book once your flight time is fixed and pick the entry slot three hours ahead of it.

North is easyJet's terminal (the airline flies only from this side, and which terminal your airline uses settles it for everyone else), so its five bookable lounges are built for holiday traffic and early starts: four of the five open at or before 05:00. The full No1 Lounge review covers the £40 standard-bearer, a buffet, a tended bar and runway views, open 04:00 to 21:00, the longest day at the airport alongside its South twin.

My Lounge, from £38, is the casual room: help-yourself food and drinks, a games room, and space that suits families and groups; it began life as easyJet's Gateway lounge and kept the relaxed brief when it took the My Lounge name in 2024. Clubrooms, from £44, goes the other way: adults only from 12 up, hosted table service instead of a buffet, and Fast Track security included in every booking, with doors from 05:00.

Plaza Premium, from £46, is the top-floor room with floor-to-ceiling windows, a hot buffet and a kids' zone, open 04:00 to 20:00. Its sibling Plaza Express, from £36, sits on the 4th floor near gates 45 to 55 and trades range for price: a salad bar and a short express menu rather than the full spread, and a 16:00 close that makes it a morning-flight product. The Emirates lounge completes the North set for that airline's own passengers; access rules sit in the airline section below. Room-by-room detail, including where each door hides, lives in the North Terminal lounge guide.

South, the station-side terminal, carries four bookable lounges plus both British Airways rooms. No1 Lounge matches its North twin: £40, 04:00 to 21:00, buffet and tended bar. My Lounge South, £38 and open 04:00 to 20:00, holds this side's party trick, the only outdoor terrace at Gatwick, a fenced deck with runway views where smoking is permitted, which makes it the one airside smoking option at the airport and worth knowing about even if you never buy another lounge pass.

Clubrooms South runs the same formula as North, £44 with table service, a 12-and-over door and Fast Track security bundled in, and its 06:00 to 21:00 day makes it the latest-closing lounge at Gatwick, useful for the evening wave. Club Aspire is the price floor of the whole airport at £34, a straightforward room with hot food and a tended bar; its 06:00 to 19:00 hours are the shortest, so check your boarding time against that close before booking it for an evening departure.

The British Airways Club and First lounges sit above the departure lounge on the upper mezzanine, covered below with the other airline rooms. Locations, photos-worth-of-detail and the room-by-room run-through are in the South Terminal lounge guide.

People searching for a VIP lounge at Gatwick are usually after one of two different things, and the airport sells both. One is the premium end of the ordinary lounge range, which you can book yourself in a minute. The other is a genuine private terminal, which you cannot.

Clubrooms is the VIP tier of the normal lounges, and it runs in both terminals at £44. What separates it from the £34 to £40 rooms is service rather than square footage: hosted table service instead of a buffet queue, an adults-only door from age 12, and Fast Track security included in the price rather than sold separately at £6. If you have looked at No1 Lounge and wondered what the upgrade buys, that is the answer, and at roughly a tenner over the No1 price it is the easiest upgrade decision at the airport. It is also the one lounge where Priority Pass does not simply let you walk in: members pay an additional fee at both terminals.

Signature ELITE Class is the actual private terminal, and it is a different product rather than a better lounge. It sits in its own building a short walk from the South Terminal, and the airport describes bringing security, customs, immigration and luggage check-in to you rather than you queueing for any of them. You get a private lounge used only by your own party, private screening, and a transfer directly to the aircraft. This is Gatwick's equivalent of the private-terminal services at the larger airports, and it is aimed at that market.

Two honest notes before you enquire. Gatwick publishes no price for it: the airport's own page says bookings must be made directly with the Signature team, and there is no public rate card, which in practice means it is priced in the hundreds per party rather than the tens per person. And it is a South Terminal product, so it is not an option if you are flying from North. For almost everyone reading this page, Clubrooms at £44 is the VIP experience worth having, and Signature ELITE Class is the answer to a different question.

One more room deserves a mention here even though you cannot buy your way in. The Emirates lounge in the North Terminal is the most comfortable space at the airport by most accounts and the only departure lounge with showers, but it opens for that airline's eligible cabins and status tiers only, covered with the other airline lounges below.

Priority Pass, the membership scheme bundled with many bank accounts and charge cards, opens eight of the nine bookable lounges: No1, My Lounge, Clubrooms and Plaza Premium at North, and No1, My Lounge, Clubrooms and Club Aspire at South. Two conditions matter. Clubrooms admits members only against an additional fee at both terminals, and every lounge admits members only while space lasts, which is exactly when you least want to gamble. The No1-family lounges sell members a pre-booked slot for a small fee, and on a school-holiday morning that fee is the difference between a seat and a shrug. Priority Pass's Gatwick list shows current terms; Plaza Express is not in the network.

Other schemes reach the same rooms by different doors. American Express Platinum's lounge programme includes Plaza Premium at North with no fee at the door, and bank packages that bundle LoungeKey or DragonPass typically mirror the Priority Pass roster. If lounge access is the reason you are weighing a paid account or card, check its Gatwick list against this page first; and if you fly once or twice a year, a £34 to £46 day pass beats any membership arithmetic.

British Airways keeps two lounges in the South Terminal, up on the departure lounge's upper mezzanine behind a shared entrance, reached by lift after security. The Club lounge takes business-class passengers (Club Europe or Club World tickets) plus British Airways Club Silver members and oneworld Sapphire card holders, each with one guest. The First lounge takes British Airways Club Gold and oneworld Emerald, also with a guest apiece. No first-class cabin flies from Gatwick, so the First lounge works in practice as the status room rather than a cabin perk. Neither lounge sells entry at any price; the BA lounge guide covers eligibility edge cases and what the rooms are like inside.

Emirates runs its own lounge in the North Terminal for its Dubai flights, sized like the aircraft it serves: around 255 seats, a full bar and buffet, and showers. Entry goes to Emirates first and business passengers, Emirates Skywards Platinum and Gold members, and Qantas's top frequent-flyer tiers when flying Emirates. Uniquely at Gatwick, the airline also sells entry to its own economy passengers, priced in dollars at US$125 for Skywards members and US$155 for everyone else, plus UK VAT, for up to four hours before departure. Passengers on every other airline default to the pay-per-use lounges above; most carriers that offer lounge access at Gatwick simply contract one of them, so check your airline's page for which name is on your invitation.

Landing off a night flight is the moment Gatwick's lounges are least able to help, with one exception. Arrive & Refresh, sold through the airport's lounge channel from £109 per stay, hands you a private room at the Sofitel by the North Terminal for about four hours: en-suite shower, continental breakfast, wifi and use of the hotel gym, open to arrivals from any airline in any cabin. Check-in runs through the morning with checkout by early afternoon, which fits the wave of long-haul and red-eye arrivals it exists for. From the South Terminal, the free terminal shuttle puts you at its door in a few minutes.

It is also, plainly, the shower answer. None of the nine pay-per-use departure lounges advertises showers, and the Emirates lounge's washrooms serve only its own eligible passengers, so a private room with a power shower and breakfast is the one bookable wash at the airport. For the night before an early flight rather than the morning after a long one, sleeping at Gatwick overnight covers the terminal-floor economics honestly, including when a £109 morning room beats a £100 night in a bed.

Run the arithmetic before the romance. A pass buys up to three hours of food, drinks, seats and quiet; an airside breakfast with a couple of drinks can reach lounge money without trying, so for a long dwell, a delayed flight or anyone planning more than one round at the bar, the pass pays its way. For a tight connection or an hour of dwell after the security queue, it cannot: you would pay £38 to £46 for a coffee and a croissant on fast-forward. Time the decision from the queue, not the front door, and if the answer is no, the airside restaurants and bars are the alternative the money was competing with.

One bundle beats its parts. Clubrooms charges £44 and includes Fast Track security, which sells separately from £6; No1 at £40 plus its own Fast Track pass lands at £46, so the quieter room with table service is, oddly, the cheaper package. Families run the other way: Clubrooms will not take under-12s, so the family money goes to My Lounge with its games room, or Plaza Premium's kids' zone, or nowhere at all on the grounds that £150 of passes buys a lot of airside breakfast.

The last honest caveat is capacity. At peak weeks every lounge is selling to its cap, and a full lounge is a busy café with better chairs; reviews written in a quiet October rarely describe a half-term Friday. Book early for the calm the brochure photographed, aim for the earliest slot your three hours allow, and remember the close times: a 16:00 door at Plaza Express and a 19:00 one at Club Aspire rule them out for evening flights entirely.