A new VIP lounge opened Monday morning at Ben Gurion Airport’s Terminal 3, in the duty-free area beside the synagogue — arriving roughly a month before the heaviest inbound travel weeks of the Jewish year.
The lounge runs about 250 square meters and is the first of two that Jetex, the Emirati aviation services group, will operate at Ben Gurion in partnership with LAYAM, part of Teddy Sagi’s group. The second, at roughly 370 square meters, is expected to open in the coming months, giving the two facilities a combined 620 square meters. It operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The menu is led by chef Eitan Mizrahi, formerly of the Royal Beach hotel in Tel Aviv, built around an interpretation of Israeli cooking, with desserts from pastry chef Dudu Otmezgine, Nespresso coffee and a bar stocked with international brands. The facility includes a cold buffet of cheeses and salads, a hot buffet with pizzas and burekas, and dedicated work and rest areas.
Who gets in
Premium-cabin passengers and eligible club members enter at no charge. Holders of American Express premium cards also enter free — but the physical card must be presented at the desk, and a card stored in a digital wallet will not be accepted. Guest entry follows the terms published by American Express. The arrangement falls under an exclusive credit-card agreement between American Express and Jetex.
Business-class passengers on foreign carriers operating at Ben Gurion, including Etihad, British Airways and Air France, also enter free, as do members of the Israeli Medical Association and other institutional partners of the group. Travelers without an entitlement can buy a single entry for $100 per person.
The question American travelers need to ask first
This is where readers flying in from New York should slow down. The American Express relationship in Israel runs through the local licensee, and Israeli reporting on Monday’s opening describes eligibility by card tier without specifying the country of issue.
When Jetex opened its earlier Ben Gurion lounge in partnership with American Express Israel, access was limited to Israeli-issued Platinum and Centurion cards. A U.S.-issued Platinum or Centurion card did not qualify, and neither did Priority Pass membership attached to it — a repeat of the situation at the former Dan Lounge, where American cardholders were routinely turned away at the desk. Priority Pass has not been accepted at Ben Gurion since January 2026.
Anyone counting on a U.S. Platinum card to cover a family’s pre-flight stop should confirm eligibility with American Express before arriving, rather than at the entrance with luggage and a boarding time. At $100 a head for walk-in entry, a family of four discovering the answer at the door is looking at $400.
The timing is the business story
Rosh Hashana begins at sundown on Friday, September 11, Yom Kippur falls on September 21, and Sukkot begins the evening of September 25 and runs through October 2. That sequence produces the densest concentration of inbound and outbound traffic Ben Gurion sees all year — three separate travel peaks inside three weeks, against a fixed number of seats on a route network that has still not fully recovered its pre-war carrier mix.
The consequence for travelers is familiar: fares to Tel Aviv climb steeply into that window, and the flights that remain available fill early. The consequence for the airport is congestion — long queues, packed terminals, and a premium on any space where a family can sit down. Opening a lounge in August rather than October is a commercial decision aimed squarely at that.
It also tells you something about who Jetex thinks the customer is. A Dubai-based operator of private terminals across more than 40 destinations does not enter Ben Gurion for the off-season. It enters for the weeks when demand outruns capacity and a $100 walk-in fee looks reasonable to a traveler facing a four-hour wait.
One practical note for the holiday itself: Ben Gurion effectively shuts down for Yom Kippur, and lounge service goes with it. Anyone booking around September 20 and 21 should plan on that.
The second lounge lands sometime in the coming months. Whether either one solves anything for the American traveler depends entirely on a detail that Monday’s announcements did not spell out — and that is worth a phone call before you rely on it.
JBizNews Desk | Tel Aviv
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