REVIEW: Air China First Class Lounge, Shanghai PVG

SQ Rolling out the Red Carpet for it’s F class customers

The Air China F lounge is built around a central atrium featuring the bar and buffet area

The first part of the lounge that you pass is an area with lockers and computers. I like being able to store my bag at a lounge without having to deal with an attendant. I like being able to grab a camera, use it for a while, put it away, grab my laptop, put it away, get showered etc. Having to make multiple trips to a manned cloakroom can get tedious pretty quickly, so kudos to this lounge for making things simple.

Coffees made to order. These were pretty good. I guess the addition of syrups is a nice touch for people who hate coffee and just want an excuse to drink a hot milkshake  ?

The buffet area had quite a diverse selection of hot and cold options… none of which were particularly great

I didn’t much fancy the idea of desserts for breakfast. The presentation looked nice though

A few cold savoury options

Cereals and toast. There was something quite sad about this section. All the containers looked like they needed replenishing and the fridges were rammed with cellophane wrapped sandwiches (unlabelled) and unbranded local mineral water. Decidedly un-First Class

Design-wise the lounge was great in some respects and downright weird in others. This shot paints the lounge in quite a good light. Some thought has gone into the design, I quite like the idea of the wooden slatted ‘wall’, which opens the space up nicely

However, the seating arrangement is absolutely obscure

Why pile so many chairs into an F lounge, especially without placing some dividers in between them? It honestly had more of a feel of a furniture showroom than a relaxing lounge

One redeeming feature of the lounge: natural daylight

This section reminded me of the old Priority Pass lounge in LHR T1 (this is not a good thing)

More cool Chinese vases

Kamara and I initially settled down in the dining area and ordered from the a la carte menu. We supplemented this with some cold starters. My hot and sour soup was markedly worse than my local takeaway in East London. It also ran a grotesque temperature range from tepid to almost frozen. The cold starters were ok though

The Laksa was… salvageable. It could be eaten. That’s about the nicest thing I can say about the dining options at the flagship Air China First Class Lounge in Shanghai

After that dining experience I felt quite dirty, so figured I’d have a shower. Surprisingly the shower room was spacious, very clean and had absolutely everything you would need. As a point of comparison, JL’s F lounges at HND and NRT don’t have shaving foam or moisturiser and the rooms are very cramped. Conversely BA’s shower rooms at The Concorde Room are spacious but also look like the ideal location to shoot a movie about a haunted and unusually filthy asylum. So in that respect Air China wins

Freshly wrapped towels and slippers are provided

In addition to being clean and spacious the shower had excellent pressure