Capital One Lounge Dulles Airport (and United flights)

Shortly after my short trip to the east coast in September, it was time for a second (slightly longer) trip in October. I had originally booked a really well-priced first class flight on American SFO-CLT-RIC for $470. However, I needed to push my trip back a day at the last minute and so instead, I booked a last minute United economy ticket, like on my previous trip. Honestly, the biggest perk I’ve gotten out of my United Silver Status this year has been access to these 15,000 mile economy specials, which is a sentence I never thought I’d say.

Like everyone else who travels, I have a large set of rules that I follow when traveling, based on previous experiences. One of my top rules is that I don’t transit IAD airport, especially when transferring from International to Domestic. However, I had to make an exception and connecting from SFO-IAD-RIC. 

United offers at least five flights per day from SFO to IAD, and when I took this trip in October, they offered two red eye flights: one just before 10 pm and one just before midnight. Because I don’t trust IAD, I took the earlier one and accepted the longer layover. This flight also had the bonus of being pretty empty, and I ended up with an entire row of economy plus to myself. 

Like my previous economy redeye flight, it was fine.

The interesting part of this trip though is the Capital One Lounge at Dulles Airport. In classic IAD fashion, its location is great if you’re starting from DC but terrible if you’re connecting. It’s located immediately after PreCheck security. That means it’s in the main terminal building, not on one of the concourses where flights actually leave from. It also means you have to awkwardly approach the security checkpoint to enter it while remaining airside. 

I arrived briefly after the lounge had opened and was hungry and tired but excited.

To the right as you enter is a seating area with couches and a few tables.

There are three main areas to the lounge as described below:

The main draw of this lounge, based on what I’ve read elsewhere, is the food selection. The dining area is large:

And the food selection is extensive, with a combination of pastries:

a 1950s/retro-style soda machine:

And a very wide selection of warm small plates:

I was hungry and tired, so I pretty much just took one of each:

And then another:

And then another:

And then I returned to the couch area and took a food coma nap.

I woke up about an hour later and went to check out the bar area. But decided against it, haha.

I also checked out the barista, but it was also unstaffed at the time.

Eventually, it was time to get on my flight to Richmond. From the lounge, I took the train (which replaced the “mobile lounges” for most journeys within the airport) to the area for regional aircraft. It was just as I remembered it being, but it had (thankfully) been a long time since I’d had to be in that area because of my no transiting IAD rule that had been in effect for 8 years.

The IAD-RIC flight is also so funny and so short. The flight was not completely full, so I skipped out on my Economy Plus seat in favor of an empty set of 2 closer to the front.

The plane is so small, haha. But for the short flight to Richmond, it was fine. Since I had booked the flight with miles, I wasn’t eligible for a complimentary upgrade, so the fact that this plane didn’t have a first class cabin didn’t matter to me for once. Honestly, a bit of an odd feeling, haha. 

Both red-eyes and my flight to Richmond were all actually on time, which was a welcome surprise.

In summary, these two flights were great value. Like on the previous flight, I did sleep (or at least try to) the entire time, so the scoring is somewhat meaningless again. I’ll score the ground experience in Dulles for this one, and the Capital One Lounge definitely did not disappoint, but transiting Dulles is not trivial (4/5). Having an entire row to myself both times was as good as I could’ve asked for in economy (4/5).  They had the standard buy-on-board fare on the longer flight (3/5) and basically none on the short flight (1/5), and service was good from what I can tell and done as quickly as possible to minimize disruption (4/5).  The IFE was standard on the longer flight (3/5) but non-existent on the shorter flight (1/5).  Overall, the longer flight gets a 18/25 and the shorter flight a 14/25, which were both helped by the Capital One Lounge.

I paid just 15 000 miles for this flight.  I only had 1 034 miles and so transferred an additional 14 000 miles from Chase.  Like last time, cash fares for the flight were over $400, so this was a great value (> 2.6 ¢/pt).  The ticket was automatically “credited” to United, which earned me 145 PQP for the longer flight and 6 PQP for the short flight.  However, PQP are meaningless to me currently because I earn Premier Silver simply from having Marriott Titanium status and I have 0 chance of hitting Premier Gold.