I was flying Lufthansa business class from Frankfurt to London in February 2023, which gave me a chance to try out their lounge in the B-gates area at Frankfurt Airport (non-Schengen zone). Here's what you can expect if you are planning to visit this lounge as well.
Before you even get to the lounge, if you have a business class ticket, there is a separate check-in area in the terminal and also a separate security control line. Having gone through that, followed by the passport control, I came out into the main B-gates area and started to look for signs directing you to the Lufthansa business lounge.
This brings me to the first point that could be improved. The only signs I could see were for the Senator lounge, which, while probably awesome, is also not available to normal business class passengers, so not helpful to me. I kept looking around and I just couldn't spot which way to go for the standard business lounge. Note for the future - the B-West lounge is located by gates B24-B28, so it might be easier to look for signage towards those gates, but I didn't know that at the time. There is also another lounge called B-Ost located by gates B44-B48, which might be an alternative lounge for you depending on your gate. I haven't been to that one, so don't know how the two compare. Both of those lounges are open between 6am and 10pm at the time of writing, but it's always best to check the latest opening times before travelling.
Anyway, back to my search. Finally, I followed the signs for Lufthansa service centre, hoping that at least there I could find someone to direct me, and it is while following that route that I could finally see some signage for the Lufthansa business lounge. First hurdle cleared! After a relatively long trek through the airport, you go up the stairs and there you have the entrance to the lounge:
The lounge itself has a few different areas you can hang out in. The biggest is of course the main seating / eating area. There are different seating options, so you can choose from chairs, armchairs, sofa bench seats, poufs, with a table, without a table, etc. There were plenty of free seats available, though of course if you were after the coolest seats like armchairs by the window with views, those got snapped up fast.
Then there are the phone booths, just in case you need to make some calls in privacy and without disturbing the other lounge visitors.
And, finally, there is a secluded rest area where you can lie down for some peace and quiet.
The toilets were clean and functional, but nothing to write home about really.
My flight was scheduled for 3 pm, which meant that the lounge visit was the perfect time for a spot of lunch. I found the food and drink selection to be good. The soup I had was hot and tasty, and it was a regional specialty as well, a Swabian soup.
Having finished lunch, I started to wonder what time to go down for boarding. This is where a second thing that could be optimised became apparent. The monitors in the lounge area do not tell you what the status of the flight is, whereas I am used to status updates on monitors telling you when to go to gate and also when the boarding starts. Instead, here you are expected to rely on the information provided on your boarding pass, which is not always accurate. I wish I'd taken a photo to show you what information is displayed - in my memory it was just a list of flights with scheduled departure time, but I can't recall with 100% certainty.
Anyway, having gone down to the gate area at the time indicated on my boarding pass, I discovered that the boarding hadn't started yet, and so I had to spend some time waiting by the gate. I feel like having flight status updates in the lounge would have been useful so that you could avoid that extra waiting bit at the gate.
However, apart from the insufficient signage and missing flight status updates, I found my visit to Lufthansa Frankfurt airport non-Schengen B-gates business lounge very enjoyable, and it was a great start to my trip.