CheckMyLounge: Stop Getting Turned Away at the Airport Lounge
What lounge eligibility in India actually looks like - and a tool that makes it navigable.
This is the product story - what the tool does, who it’s for, and why the problem exists.
The full technical build story - architecture, data pipeline, validation workflow - is on Promptcraft: CheckMyLounge: Building a Data Product with Claude
The argument is simple.
India has over 110 million credit and debit cards in circulation. A significant chunk of them include airport lounge access as a benefit.
Most cardholders find out whether their card works by walking up to the lounge counter and trying it.
The staff member swipes.
A pause.
A shake of the head.
“Sorry sir, this card is not eligible.”
You walk back out, find a chair near Gate 14, and sit there for the next hour wondering what went wrong.
This happens every single day across every airport in India.
The Problem Is Information, Not Access
The lounge access landscape in India is genuinely complicated.
Some cards need a minimum quarterly spend to unlock visits. Some give you 2 per quarter, some give you 8 per year, some give you unlimited. Some work via Visa, some via DreamFolks, some via Priority Pass. Some lounges accept Visa but not Mastercard. Two lounges in the same terminal can have completely different access rules.
Banks update these terms quietly and without announcement. Several major banks changed their lounge eligibility rules in 2024 and 2025 - HDFC, ICICI, Yes Bank, among others - moving from simple card-swipe access to quarterly spend thresholds and voucher-based systems. With little fanfare. The information itself is buried five levels deep in a PDF that was last updated sometime in 2023.
So most people do what everyone does: they walk up to the lounge and try their luck.
That’s not a discovery problem. That’s a design problem.
What I Built
CheckMyLounge is a free, single-page tool that answers one question:
Will my card get me into the lounge at this airport?
Link: buildthisnextonline.github.io/check-my-lounge
You add your cards to a wallet, pick your airport, hit Check Eligibility. That’s it.
🟢 Eligible — walk in, no conditions
🟡 Conditional — spend threshold or voucher required
🔴 No Access — this card has no lounge benefit
No login. No app to download. No ads. Just the answer.
For each card you can expand the details: visit limits, spend conditions, the access program (DreamFolks, Priority Pass, LoungeKey, Mastercard India), and card-specific notes. The tool also shows which lounges are at your airport, which terminal they’re in, and which networks each one accepts.
Your wallet persists across sessions. Add your cards once and they’re there the next time you open the tool.
What It Covers
16 issuers - HDFC, SBI, ICICI, Axis, Kotak, IndusInd, IDFC FIRST, Yes Bank, AU Small Finance, RBL, BOBCARD, American Express, Priority Pass, Standard Chartered, Federal Bank, and HSBC.
129 cards - both credit and debit. Every card in the dropdown has a verified eligibility entry. No gaps. Entry-level cards that have no lounge access are explicitly marked No Access — not omitted. This matters because it stops you guessing whether your SimplySAVE, Flipkart card, or standard savings account debit card might work somewhere.
18 airports - India’s top destinations by passenger traffic: Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Kochi, Pune, Goa, Thiruvananthapuram, Jaipur, Lucknow, Guwahati, Chandigarh, Nagpur, Bhubaneswar, and Visakhapatnam.
29 lounges - with specific terminal locations and the exact networks each one accepts. Because Lounge A and Lounge B at the same airport can have completely different access rules, and that distinction matters when you’re standing 10 minutes before boarding.
A few things worth knowing:
Cards with quarterly spend conditions are marked Conditional regardless of how generous the visit cap is. A card that gives 24 visits per year but requires ₹1 lakh spend in the previous quarter is still conditional - and the tool tells you that.
International lounge access is tracked separately from domestic. The access program often differs: DreamFolks handles most domestic, Priority Pass or LoungeKey handles most international.
Priority Pass works differently from bank cards - no card type, no Visa/Mastercard network. The tool handles this cleanly: select Priority Pass and the Type and Network fields automatically clear.
Debit card access works differently from credit cards. Most debit lounge access runs directly through Visa, Mastercard, or RuPay network programs - not DreamFolks. HDFC moved to a voucher-based system in January 2026, requiring ₹10,000 spend in the previous quarter to unlock a digital voucher. The tool tracks these distinctions per card.
Why This Problem Hasn’t Been Solved Yet
Lounges did try. A couple of years ago, eligibility-checking kiosks appeared at lounge entrances - scan your card, find out if you qualify before joining the queue. A sensible idea. It didn’t take off.
Because even with a kiosk right there, people still walk up to the counter and try their luck.
Why wouldn’t they? There’s no cost to trying. You swipe, it fails, you shrug and walk away. Nothing lost except 90 seconds and a little dignity.
The problem is that when everyone does this - and at a busy airport, everyone does - it comes at everyone else’s expense. You’re standing in a queue watching person after person pull out card after card, each one getting declined, the lounge staff patiently swiping through a wallet’s worth of plastic.
Here’s a different idea:
Charge for failed attempts.
Every card presented at the counter that doesn’t clear - automatic ₹50 charge. Small enough that it’s not punitive. Large enough that it makes you think twice before handing over a card you’re not sure about.
Pair it with CheckMyLounge. Tell people upfront: you can try your luck, but every failed attempt costs you. Suddenly, checking your eligibility before you arrive becomes worth doing.
It makes people responsible for wasting others’ time. It also gives them an easy way to avoid the charge. The queue moves faster for everyone.
We should be spending more time inside the lounge than queueing outside it.
The Bigger Observation
The lounge access problem exists because the information is fragmented across dozens of bank websites, each with their own terminology, their own update cadence, and their own incentive to make upgrades sound more attractive than the fine print allows.
Banks have no incentive to surface the full picture — especially the “your card doesn’t work here” answer. A neutral tool does.
This is exactly the kind of problem a small, focused tool can solve better than any bank portal ever will.
No stakeholder alignment needed. No product roadmap. No quarterly review.
Just identify the friction, build the thing, ship it.
Build This Next
If you want to take this further, here’s what one could build next:
Crowdsourced updates — the data is open source and contribution guidelines are already on GitHub. Banks update lounge terms quietly and without notice - if you spot something outdated, the instructions for submitting a correction are there.
Spend tracker — if your card has a quarterly spend condition, track how close you are to unlocking your visits. Conditional cards now make up the majority of the mid-tier market.
Trip mode — enter your flight and airport, get a pre-trip eligibility summary. Integrates neatly with an itinerary.
Multi-leg — you’re flying DEL→BOM→LKO. What can you access at each stop?
Search by card name — the dataset is now large enough that hierarchical dropdowns are starting to feel slow for people who know exactly which card they hold. A search-first UI would make the tool faster for power users.
The tool exists.
The data is maintained.
The infrastructure is in place.
Build This Next.
CheckMyLounge is free and open source. Try it at buildthisnextonline.github.io/check-my-lounge. Data compiled from public bank disclosures, DreamFolks, Priority Pass, and card network program pages — last updated April 2026. Verify with your bank before travel — lounge terms change frequently and without notice.
The full technical build story is on Promptcraft: CheckMyLounge: Building a Data Product with Claude
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