Revolut Is Building Its Own Airport Lounges

Revolut is getting into the lounge business properly. The company has confirmed it will build a network of its own branded airport lounges across Europe, starting with a flagship site at Copenhagen Airport in 2027. This sits alongside the lounge booking feature that already exists in the app, which is a different thing entirely, and the difference matters.

I have been fairly sceptical about fintech travel perks over the years, mostly because they tend to be reheated versions of things that already exist. This one is different in kind. Building physical lounges is expensive, slow and hard to walk back. That alone makes it worth paying attention to.

Here is what is confirmed, stripped of the press release gloss:

Copenhagen was picked because the Nordics are a growth market for Revolut. The company has more than two million customers in the region and expects to pass three million by the end of this year. Globally it is now above 75 million customers.

Note the word "common-use" in that Schengen claim. That is lounge industry language for a lounge that multiple airlines and access schemes feed into, rather than a private club for one bank's customers. It hints that this will not be a Revolut-only room, which has implications I will come back to.

This is the part most people actually care about right now, because 2027 is a long way off. The existing setup is a booking product, not an ownership product. Revolut lets you book into more than 1,600 third-party lounges worldwide through the app, and what you pay depends on your plan:

You can add guest passes for travel companions, and Revolut allows refunds on unused passes within 14 days of purchase. If you want to check what is actually available at your airport before committing to a plan, our Airport Lounge List covers lounges worldwide with amenities and opening hours, and the lounge access finder lets you work out which schemes get you through the door.

The £55 Ultra maths is worth doing honestly. That is £660 a year. If you are flying often enough that unlimited lounge access is genuinely worth £660 on its own, you are probably already flying enough to hold airline status, or to justify a premium card. I hold Amex Business Platinum, which covers me for lounges through Centurion and Priority Pass, so Ultra has never made sense on top of that for me personally. Your mileage will vary if you have no cards and want one clean subscription that handles it.

If you do want to try Revolut, you can sign up here. Start on a free plan and see how often you would actually use the lounge feature before you pay for anything.

Here is what is missing from the announcement, and it is the single most important detail: Revolut has not said which plans will get into the Revolut Lounge, or on what terms.

That is not a small omission. Will Ultra customers walk in free? Will Metal? Will Standard customers pay a gate price like anyone else? Will it simply join the existing 1,600-lounge pool and be bookable at a discount? Every one of those is a completely different product, and until Revolut says, nobody can sensibly judge whether this is a reason to upgrade a plan.

The "common-use" framing makes me suspect it will be broadly accessible rather than a walled garden, which would be good news for everyone and slightly less exciting for Revolut subscribers specifically. I would rather flag that as an open question than pretend I know.

The other gaps are simpler. No further airports have been named. No UK airport has been confirmed. And 2027 is far enough out that plans can change, as anyone who has followed airport lounge construction timelines will tell you.

This lands in the same week that Revolut premium members reported losing access to some WeWork locations, another headline perk. Revolut has confirmed there has been a change to the available locations while saying more than 265 remain active for premium members.

I do not think that is a scandal, and partner networks shift all the time. But it is a useful reminder of the structural difference between the two things. A perk that depends on a third-party partner can be trimmed at renewal. A lounge you have built and part-funded yourself cannot. That is arguably the whole strategic point of this announcement, and it is a reasonable bet on Revolut's part.

The obvious comparison is the American Express Centurion Lounge network, which is the model here: a card issuer building its own branded spaces rather than renting someone else's. Amex has been at this for over a decade and has only recently expanded meaningfully in Europe, with Amsterdam becoming its second European Centurion Lounge location.

That tells you something about the pace. Building good lounges in constrained airport real estate is genuinely difficult, and one site in 2027 followed by "key international hubs beyond" is a realistic timeline rather than a slow one. It also tells you that if Revolut wants to be a serious lounge network in Europe, this is a five to ten year project, not a two year one.

Where Revolut has an edge is scale of customer base and a willingness to spend. Where Amex has an edge is that its lounges are attached to cards that also earn transferable points at a decent rate. Which brings me to the thing I think UK readers should actually focus on.

Honestly? Very little, for now. There is no UK lounge, no access rules and no date beyond "2027". This is a story to file away rather than act on.

The more immediately useful Revolut angle for a UK points collector remains RevPoints. You can earn up to 1 point per £1 on eligible spending depending on your plan, and transfer points to airline partners including British Airways, Air France and Qatar Airways. That makes Revolut a genuine, if modest, Avios earning route. We have covered the RevPoints to Avios transfer bonuses and the Etihad transfer route before, and those are where the value sits today.

That said, RevPoints should be a supplement rather than a strategy. For most UK collectors the heavy lifting is still done by a proper Avios earning card, and our UK Avios credit card guide is the better starting point if you are building from scratch. If you are self-employed or run a company, the business card guide is where the bigger numbers are.

And if you are travelling in the meantime and just want to know whether you will need a lounge at all, Flight Queue gives you estimated security and passport control queue lengths, with live data for Heathrow and Dublin. A short queue and a decent airside coffee shop occasionally beats paying for a crowded lounge, which is not a fashionable thing to say but is often true.

I like this announcement more than I expected to. The lounge market has drifted towards overcrowded rooms with mediocre food and a queue at the door, and Nasrallah is not wrong that most people find lounges underwhelming. Someone with money and a design obsession having a proper go at fixing that is welcome, whoever it is.

But I would gently push back on the framing that this is a new travel benefit. Right now it is a construction announcement with an unspecified access policy at an airport most UK readers will never route through, arriving in eighteen months at the earliest. Those are two very different things, and the gap between them is where a lot of fintech travel marketing lives.

Ask me again when we know who gets in, and where the second one is going.

Jack