Editorial standards

What we publish

Lounge Frog publishes two kinds of page, and we label which is which.

• Written articles carry a byline and a publish date. The named author is responsible for every word and stands behind it. Writing tools, including AI, may help with drafting; a person reviews and approves everything before it is published.
• Data-built guides (a card's lounges at one airport, a lounge network at one airport, two cards side by side, and top-5 lists) are assembled automatically from our directory. They carry no byline and update themselves whenever the lounges, cards or scores behind them change. Scores and access data are made the way our methodology describes.

How articles are written

Every written article has to meet these rules before it can be saved:

• Headlines say what the article is about, in 110 characters or fewer, and are never in capitals.
• No clickbait: nothing that promises more than the article delivers.
• A written body is 500 to 5000 words: enough to report something, with room for an in-depth guide.
• Every published article carries at least one picture: its own photo, credited, or a photo of a lounge it covers.
• Articles are written in US English and read at a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 12 or below: short sentences and plain words, so anyone can follow them on a phone.
• No placeholder or unfinished text is ever published.
• Links go to the page they describe, on our site or the source's own.

We also aim for: a short intro that answers the question first, sections with clear subheadings, sentences a reader can follow on a phone, and links to the lounges, cards and airports an article mentions.

Which pages we ask search engines to index

A guide built from data has to add something its neighbours don't. Any page that doesn't still loads for readers, but we ask search engines not to index it and leave it out of our sitemap:

• a card or network page that covers only one lounge, which that lounge's own page already does;
• an airport guide without either source-linked analysis or both verified lounge details and a lead photo; merely adding copy does not bypass the minimum lounge count;
• a comparison where one card opens fewer than three lounges, or both open exactly the same ones;
• any page where nothing shown has been checked or updated in 18 months.

A top-5 list ranks only lounges we have photos of, so every place on it has a picture, and a list isn't published until at least three such lounges have a score; a list includes up to five.

Independence

Rankings and scores are our own. No lounge, airline, card issuer or network can pay for a place in them or for a better score. The apply buttons on card and program pages go straight to the issuer's or operator's own page, with no referral fee. Two things do earn money, and neither touches a score or a ranking: some pages carry ads, and the day pass buttons on lounge and airport pages go to LoungePair, which pays Lounge Frog a commission on passes bought through them.

Keeping it current

Lounges change hours, move and close. Pages show when their details were last checked by hand or last updated, and an article shows when it was published and when it was last changed.

Quoting and citing Lounge Frog

You're welcome to quote our scores, access lists and answers, in an article, a forum post or an AI assistant's reply, as long as you link to the page you took them from. Cite the page's canonical address (the URL without any query string) and, for anything that changes, such as hours or who gets in, the date the page says it was last checked or updated.

Assistants and their crawlers are welcome: robots.txt lets them in by name, and /llms.txt maps where each kind of answer lives, with /llms-full.txt carrying every open lounge's key facts in one file. The public data API is free to read; copying the catalog in bulk, or building a product on it, needs a licence from founder@loungefrog.com.

A ranking or comparison is our editorial judgement on the date shown, not a statement by the lounge, airline or card issuer. Please quote it as Lounge Frog's rating rather than as a fact about the lounge.

Corrections

If something is wrong, use “This is wrong” on the page or email founder@loungefrog.com. We fix errors of fact as soon as we've confirmed them, and the page's updated date moves with the fix. A correction that changes an article's meaning is noted in the article.