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| - Review 400. Woo!
I love to travel, but I am not a fancy, first class kind of traveler. On my Starbucks/freelance writing/still paying student loans income I travel on a budget, in coach. I've never been a premium/elite/platinum/gold/diamond club member of any lounge or airline, but when I had a 5 hour layover in Pearson I decided to splurge on a 2 hour pass for the Plaza Lounge.
5 hours is kind of a crappy amount of time for a layover. I guess I could have left the airport and gone downtown, but you need to be at the airport 2 hours early, and by the time I factored in getting downtown, and the price for a taxi or the UP it just wasn't worth it to me. Plus I've been to Toronto before, and I'll be back again. So The Plaza Lounge seemed like a nice way to break up my layover.
If you have an AMEX card you can save some money on the pass. The 2 hour pass was $40 regularly, and $36 with the AMEX card. Not a huge savings, but still nice. The Plaza Lounge in the International Terminal is available to anyone with a boarding pass for a direct International Flight from Pearson. There are domestic and US Plaza lounges too.
I didn't realize that the Plaza Lounge has complimentary food and beverages, which kind of sucked for me since I'd already had supper. I did have a few things, because I wanted to get my moneys worth. The drinks do include some alcoholic beverages, wine beer, and I saw some hard liquors like rum, tequila, vodka, and whiskey. I was tempted to pour myself a drink or two, but in an effort to relieve jetlag I just drank water, and lots of it. The food (for supper) included BBQ, garlic rice, soup (cauliflower cream or minestrone), some salads (fruit, a quinoa one, and caesar), and some cookies. There was also yogurt, cereal, snack foods (mixed nuts, tortilla chips), and some apples. Other nonalcoholic drinks aside from water included cans of pop, juice (orange or apple), tea, and coffee (there was on of those automatic coffee machines that can do lattes and hot chocolates and such). It's not a huge variety of food, but it's nice to have something to snack on. The food is all self-serve and the dishes are replaced often. If you want any food to go you're supposed to ask - not sure if there's an extra charge for that.
There's a washroom, that's pretty small with just two stalls, but the lounge isn't huge so it's okay.
There are several comfortable chairs around. There's wifi throughout Pearson (and it's free) so it's easy to connect online, If you don't have a computer/tablet/phone with wifi on it and you want to get online there's a small business centre with a desktop computer and a printer. There are also several pricate desk areas with a plugin and a lamp if you've got your own computer and need to do some work. There's a departure screen in the lounge because you can't hear the announcements in the terminal make sure you check the screen for flight info and that you have enough time to get from the lounge to your boarding gate for your flight. They also have a few tvs quietly playing the 24h CTV News channel.
I had a bight of a headache when I came to the lounge, and since it was pretty quiet (you really don't hear much of the noise from the terminal) it was nice to come here for a couple of hours, check my email, have something to eat and drink, and relax. It's a bit pricey, but if you're on a layover that's long enough to use the lounge and you don't want to leave the airport it's a nice way to kill some time.
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