Cathay Pacific reopens San Francisco lounge

Cathay Pacific will unlock the doors to its San Francisco business class and first class lounge on Tuesday August 29 as the airline continues to soar into a post-pandemic recovery.

That means a return for the lounge’s Noodle Bar nook and an alternative to SFO’s British Airways lounge for Oneworld flyers, albeit only across a limited set of hours on the days when Cathay flies from San Francisco to Hong Kong.

At the time of writing, the airline advises the opening hours of its SFO lounge will be “subject to” its own flight schedule, which has yet to rebound to a daily frequency.

Cathay Pacific's San Francisco lounge.

Ahead of the 12.55am departure of flight CX873, this will see Cathay’s San Francisco lounge open around 9pm; on the handful of days where CX879 is wheels-up at 1.35pm, the lounge will open mid-morning.

As is the norm, Cathay’s San Francisco lounge access will be as follows:

• first class flyers on Cathay and its Oneworld partners, along with one guest
• business class passengers on Cathay and its Oneworld partners
• Cathay Diamond frequent flyers, along with two guests
• Cathay Gold frequent flyers, along with one guest
• Cathay Silver frequent flyers
• Oneworld Emerald- and Sapphire-grade frequent flyers, along with one guest

Cathay first opened its San Francisco lounge in April 2012, with the space following the crisp design cues established in Hong Kong’s The Cabin (since permanently shuttered) and later The Wing lounges.

That includes spacious shower suites and the signature ‘Solus’ workstation booths, along with slabs on Carrara white marble and China Black granite, a reception wall made of Venetian glass tiles and warm bamboo wood finishes.

Cathay Pacific's San Francisco lounge.

Vivian Lo, Cathay’s General Manager for Customer Experience & Design, tells Executive Traveller the lounge has been given a refresh in readiness for its reopening.

Further down the track – with a date yet to be shared – the San Francisco lounge will receive  more substantial make-over, upgrading it to the same relaxed residential design as other flagship CX lounges developed for the airline by Ilse Crawford.

“We have now a very clear kind of strategic road map between now and the next five years, in terms of what to do at each location,” Lo tells Executive Traveller.

Cathay Pacific's San Francisco lounge.

That to-do list will also encompass a similar modernisation for Cathay’s Tokyo Narita lounge – which now sits in the space once occupied by the American Airlines’ Admirals Club – and the possibility of a fresh “flagship lounge” in Beijing.

As previously reported, next month will see Cathay cut the ribbon on a ‘seaport lounge’ at Shenzhen’s Shekou port terminal, where fast ferry services whisk travellers straight to the the SkyPier at Hong Kong Airport and onto their Cathay Pacific flight.

Concept images for Cathay Pacific's Shekou Ferry Pier Lounge.

Describing it as “like an airport lounge in the Shekou pier,” Lavinia Lau, Cathay Pacific’s Chief Customer and Commercial Officer, tells Executive Traveller “it will give people a taste of what they are going to have at Hong Kong airport.”

Further ahead is an all-new “flagship lounge” and potentially an arrivals lounge at Hong Kong following the reopening of the airport’s Terminal 2.