A tale of two (first class) lounges

Cathay's First Class lounge felt like a genuine premium hospitality experience, with thoughtful spaces, restaurant-style dining and service built around interaction. JAL's was beautifully Japanese in parts, but the limited food, app-based ordering and more rigid approach left me feeling surprisingly unwelcome. I was savouring every last moment at Cathay. At JAL, I left early because I couldn't wait to board.

With more than 15 airlines in the Oneworld alliance, one of the great perks of having Qantas Platinum status is getting Oneworld Emerald benefits across the alliance. Only a handful of those airlines still operate First Class, so I was pretty excited to experience the flagship First Class lounges of both Cathay Pacific in Hong Kong and Japan Airlines in Tokyo for the first time this week. What I wasn't expecting was just how different the two experiences would be.

Of course, there is a cultural element to this. A flagship lounge in Hong Kong shouldn't feel exactly the same as one in Japan, and ultimately the airline and hub you use will be governed by where you're travelling. But for Australians using Qantas Points, both Cathay Pacific and JAL can be very viable options for connecting onwards to destinations like Europe, so I think the experience on the ground is a valid comparison. And while I'd expect the design, food and style of service to reflect each airline's home culture, I'd also expect a flagship international First Class lounge to work for passengers coming from all over the world.

Cathay's The Pier First Class Hong Kong lobby

The space

Cathay's The Pier First Class at HKG lounge was beautiful. Interestingly, parts of the lounge had relatively low ceilings and the space itself wasn't enormous, but an incredible amount of thought had clearly gone into making it feel intimate rather than cramped. Instead of one huge room, there were different nooks and spaces to discover, including a lounge area, dining room, bar and private offices. The dining room in particular had a quiet, almost restaurant-like atmosphere, and the whole lounge had a warmth and cosiness that made me want to explore it.

JAL's First Class lounge at HND is much more distinctly Japanese in its design, with a cleaner and more minimalist aesthetic. It's spread across two levels, and there is a quieter area upstairs with a beautiful library-style space that was probably my favourite part of the lounge. But around 70% of the lounge felt like one enormous room.

I'll say it: to me, it looked and felt a little like a cafeteria. 

That's partly an aesthetic preference, but compared with all the different spaces and nooks at Cathay, there was much less sense of discovery.

JAL First Class lounge Haneda dining room

The food

This was probably the strongest contrast. Cathay essentially gave you a restaurant inside the lounge. There was a tasting menu as well as a full à la carte menu, with Cantonese and Western dishes and full table service. The portions were relatively small, but you could order as much or as little as you wanted, which made it quite fun to work your way through different dishes. My sister and I started with the tasting menu, which included dishes like crispy mushrooms with green beans, chicken with black truffle and prawns, and I went on to try some other dishes including a pork cutlet and a genuinely killer hamburger.

There was also a substantial self-service buffet with proper meal options, cheeses, fruit and desserts, so you were never short of something to eat. It wasn't just the quantity of food either.

Cathay's The Pier First Class Hong Kong buffet

Sitting down, ordering from a menu and having somebody bring the dishes to your table made the whole thing feel like a genuine dining experience.

The highlight of JAL's food offering was its sushi bar, where skilled sushi chefs prepare each order fresh. That's a fantastic concept and exactly the sort of feature I'd expect a Japanese flagship lounge to showcase. The problem was how limited the offering actually was.

Almost everything in the lounge had to be ordered through an app, which isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself, but the menu was surprisingly narrow. The sushi offering essentially came down to tuna, shrimp and boiled egg, which you could order individually or in combinations, with or without wasabi. There was beef curry with rice, beef curry with a smaller serving of rice, beef curry without rice, a Japanese set meal, some bread-based options and quite a few plant-based dishes.

There were very few substantial self-service options either, apart from some small snacks and nuts. I had a 10pm flight and had deliberately planned to eat dinner in the lounge before boarding.

JAL First Class lounge Haneda freshly made sushi

Trying to find something relatively healthy with a decent amount of protein was surprisingly difficult.

Even the sushi highlighted some of the rigidity of the experience. Because I was ordering several pieces to get enough fish, I was leaving quite a lot of rice behind, so I asked whether the sushi chef could simply prepare the fish as sashimi instead. The answer was a pretty firm no. That's completely their prerogative, but given that the chefs and ingredients were already there, it felt like a missed opportunity to make what should have been the signature feature of the lounge much more impressive.

JAL First Class lounge Haneda Japanese beef curry

The service and amenities

The difference in service was almost as noticeable as the food.

Cathay's lounge felt designed around hospitality and interaction. 

There was a proper restaurant with table service, a staffed bar and a complimentary spa offering treatments. We didn't manage to get a spa treatment because the next available appointment was just after our boarding time, which is fair game, but even having something like that available added to the sense that this was somewhere you could genuinely enjoy spending a few hours. Both lounges had showers, as you'd expect at this level, while JAL's more unusual additional feature was a complimentary shoeshine service.

JAL First Class lounge Haneda Japanese bar

JAL was almost the opposite when it came to interaction. The staff at the entrance were incredibly polite and welcoming, but once inside, almost everything seemed designed to minimise the need for interaction. Food was ordered through the app, there wasn't really a traditional staffed bar experience, and as the visit went on I increasingly felt awkward about interacting with the staff.

At one point, the champagne in the ice bucket near me had run out, so I took a fresh bottle from one of the open fridges. A staff member very politely stopped me and walked me to the other end of the lounge, where that particular champagne was meant to be served. He wasn't rude at all, and they were actually serving two different champagnes in different parts of the lounge, but

it added to this strange feeling that I was constantly trying to work out how I was supposed to use the space.

Later, after I'd ordered several dishes trying to piece together something resembling dinner, the empty plates started piling up on my table. By that stage, I increasingly felt like the staff didn't particularly want to engage with me, and the whole experience just became awkward. None of these moments in isolation was particularly significant, but together they changed how I felt about being in the lounge.

Cathay's The Pier First Class Hong Kong serviced bar

The feeling you leave with

Ultimately, that's probably the biggest difference between the two experiences.

Cathay was one of those rare lounge experiences where I found myself savouring every last moment before boarding. 

I'd genuinely enjoyed exploring the different spaces, sitting down for a proper meal, having a drink at the bar and discovering everything the lounge had to offer. When it was finally time to go, I was genuinely sad to leave.

At JAL, I couldn't wait to board my flight. In fact, I left the lounge earlier than I needed to because I'd simply had enough. 

None of the individual things that happened were particularly terrible, and I don't think the staff were deliberately unfriendly. But the combination of the limited food, lack of interaction, rigidity around how everything worked and the awkwardness I increasingly felt meant that by the end, I just didn't feel particularly welcome.

I spent quite a bit of time afterwards wondering whether I was looking at JAL through the wrong cultural lens. Japan obviously has its own approach to food, design and service, and I wouldn't expect a Japanese lounge to imitate Cathay or any Western airline. Nor should it. But after spending a week in Japan experiencing some genuinely extraordinary food and incredibly warm hospitality, I don't think culture completely explains the difference.

These are two flagship First Class lounges operated by major international airlines within the same alliance. They don't need to look the same, serve the same food or deliver service in the same way. In fact, I'd rather they didn't. Their differences are part of what makes travelling through different hubs interesting.

But at this level, I do think they should both leave an international passenger feeling looked after. Cathay absolutely did. JAL, for me, didn't.