LoungeBuddy is gone — how to find airport lounges now

What happened to LoungeBuddy

LoungeBuddy launched in 2013 as an independent guide to airport lounges. You told it which cards and status you held, and it told you which lounges you could walk into — across every network, not just one. It also sold single-visit passes to lounges you had no other way into.

American Express began working with LoungeBuddy in 2017, supplying its lounge ratings inside the Amex app, and announced it was acquiring the company in March 2019. LoungeBuddy continued as a wholly-owned Amex subsidiary.

The wind-down came in stages. The iOS app stopped working on 1 July 2024. The website and all remaining services shut down on 30 January 2025, with the last day to buy a lounge pass on 13 January. The Amex Green Card’s $100 annual LoungeBuddy credit ended at the same time, since there was no longer anything to spend it on.

Why its disappearance left a real gap

Plenty of tools tell you which lounges exist. LoungeBuddy answered a harder and more useful question: given the specific cards in your wallet, which lounges can you actually get into, at this airport, today.

That question has only got harder since. Through 2026 nearly every network tightened its rules — guest fees, visit caps, same-flight requirements, spending thresholds that unlock access. Knowing a lounge exists at your terminal tells you very little about whether you will be let in, or what it will cost to bring someone with you.

It is worth being plain about the structural point, without ascribing motives: an independent, cross-network tool became the property of a single card issuer, and then stopped existing. Whatever the reasoning, travellers lost the neutral version.

What people use instead

There is no single successor, and we would rather point you at the right tool than pretend we are it. Lounge review sites such as LoungeReview still carry the largest independent databases of lounges and traveller reviews, which is what you want if your question is “what is this lounge actually like inside”. A newer generation of lounge apps has appeared since the shutdown, though coverage and platform support vary — check whether one exists for your phone before relying on it.

Each lounge network also runs its own finder: Priority Pass, Amex’s Centurion site, Capital One, Delta Sky Club and the airline clubs all publish their own locations. These are authoritative for their own lounges and useless for everyone else’s, so you end up checking several.

What none of them do well is the wallet question — combining every network your particular cards touch, with the current entry conditions attached.

How HopPerks answers the same question

That wallet question is the one this site was built around. Add your cards and the lounge pages show which of them get you in, the guest policy, the entry window, and any visit cap or spending threshold that applies — across networks, without preferring any issuer.

Every fact carries the source it came from and the date it was last checked, and facts we could not confirm on an official page are labelled inferred or estimated rather than presented as certain. Lounge rules change monthly; the honest version of this tool shows you how fresh each answer is instead of hiding it.

We take no money from issuers for placement, and no issuer can change a verdict here. That is the part of LoungeBuddy worth rebuilding.

Frequently asked