By Cary Harrison – Hidden History Tours | MysteryTours.org

If you’re connecting through Norway’s sleek, silent Oslo airport, don’t expect it to reflect any level of Scandinavian efficiency.

Though the airport is airy with floor-to-ceiling glass walls wooden floors, and modern shopping venues, it doesn’t hold a candle, say, to the outstanding same-sized Tampa International Airport as far as efficiency and logic is concerned. Oslo’s Gardermoen Airport for all it’s flourishes is a tangled mess with endlessly long queues, illogical formatting, and lounge access only for elite-level fliers.Many of us have Priority Pass and the like and not one of the three lounges will honor Priority Pass. However, if you’re an American Express Platinum card holder, the OSL Lounge will let you in for free. I only discovered this unadvertised entrée by noting a tiny tabletop frame with various bank logos, including the AMEX.The tiny framed sponsor placard said nothing, offered nothing.

Faced with a $35 Lounge fee, I asked if AMEX was somehow participating. The blithe response was that Platinum cardholders got free Lounge access. Another reason I can’t more passionately advocate for the AX Platinum card (if you can swing it). It pays for itself many, many times over.

This Lounge, however, is worn, dirty (shocking for Scandinavian standards) and packed to the gills with people likely forced to pay cash to get in. Since the Oslo Airport is a hazard zone of tangled queues, bifurcated and trifurcated entryways that offer no logical purpose for their forced corralling, long layovers are most tolerably spent in lounges.

So, unless you’re biz or 1st class, you’ll pay. If you’ve got the AX Platinum, use it and squeeze every moment of relief you can out of that fancily-sterile and clunky airport-bot.

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