No1 Lounge at Gatwick: the airport's default lounge, reviewed

A No1 Lounge day pass is a single-visit ticket: book a date and an entry time, come through security, and settle in for up to three hours before your flight. Inside, everything is included in the one price. Food runs from a build-your-own full English at breakfast through hot dishes at lunch and dinner, the bar pours wines, beers, spirits and fizz without a tab, and soft drinks, hot drinks, wifi and digital newspapers round it out. There is no cover charge on anything once you are through the door.

Three mechanics matter beyond the food. The standard stay is three hours before departure, and if you want to arrive earlier you buy extra hours in advance rather than at the door. Infants under two go free. And booking directly with the operator adds delay cover, which keeps your seat until the flight actually leaves rather than turfing you out when the three hours expire; on a day of creeping delays that single clause can be worth more than the buffet. What the room does not have is a shower, at either terminal, in common with every other pay-per-use lounge at Gatwick.

No1 runs a room at each terminal, and because lounges sit airside, the one you can use is fixed the moment you clear security. Confirm which terminal your airline uses before booking, because a North pass is useless at South and there is no crossing between them once inside. Both rooms charge the same £40 starting price and keep the same 04:00 to 21:00 hours.

At the North Terminal, No1 sits at the far end of the ground-floor lounge pavilion, past My Lounge, Clubrooms and the Emirates lounge; from security you bear left into the departure lounge and follow the Lounges signs. It shares that corridor with the terminal's other rooms, mapped door by door in the North Terminal lounge guide. At the South Terminal, No1 is up on the mezzanine you land on when you leave security, at the end of a short corridor between the shops, alongside Clubrooms; the South Terminal lounge guide walks the level. Travellers who know both tend to give the North room a slight edge on space when the terminal is at full holiday stretch, but the offer is identical and the South room's runway views are the better of the two.

The signature is the bar: a central island, staffed, with seating wrapped around it, so the room reads as sociable rather than a row of waiting-area chairs. Beyond it the seating opens toward the windows and the runway, and both rooms keep a separate quiet zone for anyone who wants to work or sleep without the bar noise. The bar is where No1 earns its reputation, with fizz, spirits and draught poured properly and without limit inside your three hours.

The food is the more uneven half, and it is worth setting expectations. The buffet covers a build-your-own cooked breakfast in the morning and a rotating hot option or two later, usually a curry or a pasta, always with a vegetarian choice, plus cold dishes and snacks. Reviewers rate it solid rather than special, and a recurring gripe is thin salad provision and a spread that can feel picked-over at peak. Go in treating the food as good enough to skip buying dinner airside, and the bar and the seat as the real product, and the room lands well; go in expecting a restaurant and the buffet is where the gap shows.

Two official channels sell the same seat at different prices. On the day this page was researched, the airport's own lounge page listed No1 from £38, below the £40 on No1 Lounges' own site. The gap is a couple of pounds and it moves daily, but comparing the two takes a minute and sometimes saves a round of coffees. Whichever channel you pick, booking ahead beats walking up: entry is space-permitting, and the room fills to its cap on school-holiday mornings and the early departure banks, exactly when you most want a guaranteed seat.

The bigger lever is membership. No1 is in the Priority Pass network at both terminals, and many bank accounts and travel cards bundle Priority Pass or an equivalent; on the pass, a seat that costs £40 at the door drops to a small pre-booking fee or nothing at all, which changes the value case entirely. If you already carry the pass, this is close to a default booking. If you do not, weigh whether the £40 is a one-off or the sort of thing you would pay several times a year, in which case a card that includes lounge access can pay for itself. Every route in, including the card schemes, is laid out on the main Gatwick lounges guide.

Run it against what you would otherwise spend. Three hours with a couple of drinks, a plate of food and a proper seat costs real money at an airside bar, so for a long wait, an early start you want to spend horizontal, or anyone who will visit the bar more than once, the £40 pass clears its own price without much argument. Add a delay and the direct-booking delay cover turns it from comfortable into genuinely useful.

The case collapses in the other direction. For an hour of dwell after a slow security queue, you would be paying £40 for a hurried coffee and a croissant, and the maths never works; the fix is to time your three-hour window from the queue, not the front door. The other honest caveat is capacity. At peak weeks the room sells to its cap, and a full No1 is a busy bar with better chairs rather than the calm the brochure photographed, so book the earliest slot your flight allows and set expectations for a half-term Friday accordingly. If the sums say no, the next question is simply whether My Lounge two doors down does the same job for £2 less, and often, for the price, it does.