A High Klout Score Gets You Into Cathay Pacific’s First Class Lounge at SFO

Cathay Pacific is one of my favourite airlines. They live, eat and breathe service, from having great planes with reasonable layouts (as compared to say, United Airlines’ “Economy Minus”) and amenities (they’ve had individual seat-back entertainment units since the late ’90s) to niceties I haven’t seen any other airline provide (such as a HK$50 coupon for food at the Hong Kong airport if you’re going to stay there for over an hour).

Unfortunately, I don’t fly on Cathay Pacific either frequently or expensively enough to merit a pass to their amazing first class/business/elite traveller lounge, featured in the video below:

That changed as of yesterday. Cathay Pacific signed a deal with Klout, the web service that assigns people a score based on their influence across social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and so on. If you have a Klout score greater than 40, you can use their lounge at San Francisco’s airport as if you were a first class passenger. Next to me, The World’s Greatest Accordion-Playing Tech Evangelist and the Thrilla from Manila, I qualify by a decent margin:

All you need to do is walk up to the lounge’s front desk, call up your Klout score on your phone, show off your score and if you’ve got the juice, you’re in!

This isn’t the first of a few perks that I’ve qualified for with my Klout score. The best one was still the free flight to San Francisco on Virgin Airlines.

I’m now waiting for perks based on your Klouchebag score, the rating based on your Klout douchebaggery:

 

I have no clear idea why Klouchebag thinks I have English problems. I’m told that it considers the use of exclamation marks to be “misuse”.