Free / cheap ways to get airport lounge access?

If you have a Barclays Premier current account, you can pay £11.50 per month for travel insurance and airport lounge access. It's not exactly cheap though - the bank account costs £10 per month already and you need to meet certain criteria.

Barclays used to have a current account called Premier Life which cost £25 per month, but it came with a whole lot more including breakdown cover, phone and gadget insurance, extended white-goods warranty, a concierge service, good travel insurance, airport access, increased banking limits, priority in-branch service and more. This bank account was discontinued when the new Premier account was introduced.

Before we discuss ways to get in, you first need to remember that lounges aren't free. Someone somewhere needs to be paying for it! Depending on the facilities and location of the lounge, it can vary quite a bit. Discussions on FlyerTalk seem to indicate that the wholesale cost per visit is measured in tens of dollars. Mark that up for consumer sale, and you get to the typical prices that get charged for lounge access (for those lounges who offer paid-for access).

For cheap access, one answer is to find a cheap lounge! A lounge which doesn't offer very much (eg no alcohol, no food) has a much lower cost base than one which offers hot food and nice drinks, so these lounges which are cheaper to operate are cheaper to get access to. In some airports, there are multiple lounges to which access can be purchased, if you go for the ones which offer less then costs are generally lower. If all you're after is somewhere quiet, maybe with wifi, then this style of lounge might work. However, you may be better off just finding a less busy bit of the airport, and spending the money on refreshments yourself.

Otherwise, you need to find a way for someone else to be paying for your lounge access. If you have a suitable frequent traveller status (probably with a non-US carrier), or you're travelling in a premium cabin, then that's largely rolled into your ticket cost(s) and you get it that way. For the frequent traveller status angle, it's worth noting that the cost isn't evenly spread across all tickets. You can get status fairly cheaply if you're cunning, just google things like "status run", "tier points run" or "elite qualifying miles run" for details (the exact phrase depends on what your FF program calls things). If you happen to be most of the way towards hitting status in a suitable airline alliance, then a tier points run can make quite a bit of sense, and work out as a fairly cheap way to get lounge access when averaged across the visits in the next year.

Next up, look out for credit cards aimed at frequent travellers. This might not work out for budget travellers, as they often have annual fees, and normally strict earning requirements / credit scores, but if you can get one these can offer cheap lounge access, especially if you value the other benefits they offer. For example, you might decide that the annual fee of a card that gives a priority pass membership, less what you'd have to pay on the open market for travel insurance that the card gives, divided by your number of lounge trips per year, could work out as quite a cheap per-visit cost. All depends on how much you value the total card package, and how many lounge visits you'll use.

Finally, you can always try to get someone who has guest lounge access to let you in. This works best if it's someone you know, so for example pick a flight at about the same time as one of your friends, so they can guest you in! Most paid for lounge programs (eg most Priority Pass memberships) don't offer free guest access, so that's unlikely to work out well. However, most FF programs which offer lounge access include a guest, so that's a better bet. If you don't know anyone travelling that day, then you might be able to find someone on a suitable FF forum who could guest you in. This will work best if you're a regular on a forum - most people are happy to guest in those who contribute to the forum and help out others with answers, while a first timer asking for lounge access may not have nearly so much luck... Finally, you can try to find someone at the lounge to let you in. Asking within earshot of the lounge staff isn't recommended, and be prepared to be disappointed, but you could get lucky especially if you're well dressed and polite. (Unwashed backpackers are often out of luck, but you never know what a friendly chat with someone on the bus to the terminal may offer, especially if you've something in common)

Depending on the airline, quite often members of Priority Clubs can invite a guest into the lounge with them. So if you're brazen enough, you could consider asking individuals going in if they'd mind if you joined them.

Of course, this can go badly sometimes ;)