The world’s finest airport lounges

A version of this article was published in the Financial Times Globetrotter column, 21 May 2025

A frequent flyer’s guide to the world’s finest airport lounges

The Qantas First Lounge in Sydney, designed by Marc Newson.

For the regular commuter, a lounge should be like a club. Reassuring and welcoming, perhaps with a favourite armchair or dish to look forward to, familiar staff who recognise you, and fellow travellers a number of whom you know. (How, over years of toing and froing between London and Johannesburg, I became attached to my shower-dinner-small-talk ritual at the BA lounge at OR Tambo.) For the holidaymaker or the honeymooner, a lounge is a treat, the first stop after the rush to get away, a place where you can quaff a little champagne and know that the trip has started. The best lounges embrace both congregations, work and life balanced on a boarding card.

After 30 years of experiencing the highs and the lows of hundreds of lounges in around 75 countries, I have developed an almost philosophical idea of what I like, and dislike, in a lounge. 

A good lounge should be both practical and privileged. The Lufthansa First Class Terminal at Frankfurt airport and the Aether Private Terminal at Manchester achieve this perfectly: small standalone buildings allowing you to get from car to lounge in a couple of minutes without setting foot in the rest of the airport. At the Virgin Upper Class Wing (Heathrow Terminal 3), a dedicated driveway takes you up to the private check-in area and lounge on the first floor of the terminal. At the Aether Private Terminal, back-ended security allows you to stay with non-travelling guests until you board.

Getting from the lounge to the plane must be easy. The typical 15-minute Heathrow walk, while good for step count, means that you tend to arrive at the gate rather too early or a little too late. The Aether lounge, and — for their first-class passengers — the lounges at Air France (Paris), Lufthansa (Frankfurt) and Swiss (Zurich) spirit their customers at just the right moment to the plane in a BMW, a Mercedes or a Porsche. BA’s lounges at Boston, Emirates’ in Dubai and Etihad’s in Abu Dhabi have direct access to the gates below.

A shower cabin in a Swiss First lounge in Zurich airport.

Gleaming, gushing, and plentiful showers are essential after a long day trip or before a night flight. The Swiss First shower cabins in Zurich radiate Swissness: brilliant white, named after Swiss watering holes (Ascona, Grindelwald), with Alpine herb-scented Rausch products. Cathay (The Wing, Hong Kong) and Lufthansa (First Class, Frankfurt) provide generous bathtubs. The Carrara marble shower rooms in Qantas’s Singapore First lounge invigorate you for the next leg of your transcontinental flight. Well-polished shoes invigorate me too and so I always look forward to JAL’s impeccable John Lobb-branded shoeshine service in the “library” of its First Class lounge at Haneda in Tokyo. I do miss the days when I could get a haircut at the Virgin Clubhouse in Heathrow.

Sleeping rooms can be terrific for connections: Etihad’s “relaxation rooms” in its Abu Dhabi Business Class lounge offer darkness, privacy and quiet, while Air France, Etihad and Swiss offer bedrooms to first-class passengers.

A good lounge should also give you a strong sense of place. It starts with a great view — from the Qantas lounges towards the Sydney skyline, from the Marco Polo lounge (Venice) towards the campanile of Torcello, of the contours of the Peak District from the Aether Private Terminal (Manchester) or of the Swiss Alps (Swiss lounges, Zurich Terminal E). The very best lounges have outdoor space: Lufthansa First (Munich) boasts a panoramic rooftop, while Swiss First (Zurich Terminal E) has its own generous terrace. (Mataveri airport on Easter Island and Barra in the Outer Hebrides make up for not having lounges by offering passengers, respectively, a garden adorned with a Moai statue and a sandy beach, which is also the runway.)

A coat hook by Studio Henry Wilson in the David Caon-designed Qantas First Class lounge in Singapore.

Design and architecture define place and (importantly for flag carriers) a sense of national identity. Qantas and Cathay Pacific led the way in the late 1990s and early 2000s by employing, in the case of Qantas, Australian industrial designer Marc Newson and, for Cathay Pacific, John Pawson to design their lounges, while Sir Terence Conran’s elegant British Airways Concorde Room in the old Terminal 7 at JFK was always a benchmark in good design. While Newson’s futuristic schemes can still be enjoyed in the Qantas First Class lounges in Los Angeles and Sydney, Qantas’s newer lounges in Perth and Singapore are, together with its aircraft interiors, beautifully created by Australian designer David Caon using sleek fixtures by Studio Henry Wilson. Cathay went on to use Foster + Partners and most recently has used Ilse Crawford to redesign its Hong Kong lounges in a soft, Asian idiom. The rustic décor of the Swiss Alpine lounge (Zurich) evokes a mountain hut, a contemporary take on the jet-set Gemütlichkeit of the Eagles Ski Club in Gstaad. 

Architectural settings enhance your experience: the Etihad lounges (Abu Dhabi) are enfolded in the dune-like undulations of Kohn Pedersen Fox’s new terminal; Air France’s Schengen business lounge at Charles de Gaulle 2F, designed by Jouin Manku, integrates beautifully into the glass curves of Paul Andreu’s structure around it.

The walls of a lounge can tell you a lot about the country you are in and the airline you are flying: from portraits of assorted autocrats (all over the world) to an effigy of Nefertiti in the VIP terminal in Cairo and a photograph of Fidel Castro in the old CIP lounge in Maputo. Although BA divested much of its excellent British art collection during the pandemic, some good pieces remain, such as the beautiful Susan Derges photograms in the Concorde Room at Heathrow T5. I used always to enjoy the John Virtue paintings in the old BMI lounge at Heathrow T1. If only airlines and museums would collaborate to follow the lead of the Rijksmuseum’s Schiphol airport gallery, with its changing displays of works from the museum’s collections, and make the most of these ultra-secure environments to display great art in more lounges.

A minibus for premium passengers in Kinshasa airport, DRC.

Lounges should give you a sense of the journey that awaits you. In the old Air France Concorde lounges at Roissy, similar to how top French chefs will walk the salle to greet their diners, Concorde’s pilots would work the room to discuss the flight with their passengers before they boarded the rocket outside. Captains of commerce at the captain’s table.

What you eat in the lounge contributes to your sense of travel and (particularly when in transit) to the excitement of moving across the globe. You know you are in Lisbon when you are presented with a tray of glistening pasteis de nata (in the TAP lounge), in Hong Kong when offered the most delicate dim sum (in the Cathay lounges), in Vienna when consuming Knödel dumplings and Veltliner (in the Austrian business lounge), in the Middle East when torn between baba ganouche and a foie gras en bouche (at Emirates First, Dubai) or in South Africa when your peanut butter is laced with biltong (at Shongolo lounge, Johannesburg). 

Above all, people make a lounge. Staff must make you feel valued and welcome rather than, as is so often the case, the subject of an entrance examination. And other travellers are crucial: you can read a country through its airport lounges — an Air France or Brussels Airlines lounge in West Africa is like a who’s who of local life and commerce. Transiting Asian delegations in the lounges of Addis or Doha, miners at either end of the Wallaby Route or on the way from London to Santiago, pharmaceutical folk flying from Basel to Beijing, Rudy Giuliani shaving over a lobster bisque in the Delta lounge at JFK . . . lounges tell you about commerce, trade flows and local society.

A work booth in the Swiss First lounge in Zurich.

What makes a bad lounge

A description of what makes a good lounge would not be complete without mentioning some of the things that make a bad lounge. Too often, lounges are overcrowded, often because the seating hasn’t been considered (tables for two or four in business airports serving single travellers). Chairs are too low and soft to work, let alone dine, in and tables are lacking or inadequate; the finest lounges give you the option of private booths with desks and office chairs (my favourite is the veneered Sils-Maria booth in the Swiss First lounge at Kloten, Single Man meets Sound of Music with a dash of Nietzsche) or dining tables (Concorde lounge, Terminal 5). Frequently there is no day light, or even adequate reading light. Windowless lounges, such as the AA/BA Chelsea lounge at JFK, are as numbing and joyless as the inside of a casino. Noisy sports are broadcast on large screens (a particular issue in Latin America) with no quiet areas. Extraordinarily, there are lounges which ask you to leave at closing time, even if your plane is delayed (as I recently experienced with Austrian in Vienna). In many tropical lounges the air conditioning rattles, if functioning at all. Your sense of calm may also be rattled if you have been told (as I was once in Liberia) that the lounge houses malarial mosquitoes. 

The nose of a Concorde on display in the British Airways Concorde Room, London Heathrow airport.