Qantas permanently closes Tokyo Narita airport lounge

Long considered more like an upmarket Qantas Club than a true international business class lounge, the Qantas Business Lounge at Tokyo’s Narita Airport is the airline’s latest overseas lounge to vanish from the map. 

It follows the permanent closure of the Qantas Hong Kong lounge in August 2021, although nobody would argue that the delightful Hong Kong facility was leagues ahead of its dowdy Tokyo cousin.

As it happened, in mid-2018 Qantas pledged the Tokyo Narita lounge would be upgraded along the same lines as Hong Kong and Singapore – but that renovation never took place before all the airline’s international lounges were shuttered in March 2020 as the Covid pandemic took hold.

Yet the decommissioning of Qantas’ Tokyo Narita lounge is no surprise. It catered for passengers on just two red-tailed flights, to Melbourne and Brisbane, at time when Qantas was edging towards the more convenient city-adjacent Haneda Airport as its Tokyo hub.

Qantas’ Sydney-Tokyo service – one of the last remaining Boeing 747 runs, until the jumbo’s retirement in July 2020 – already used Haneda, with the Melbourne-Tokyo service earmarked for the same shift from March 29 (another plan scuppered by Covid). 

"We expect the new Haneda service to be particularly popular with business travellers, who will save more than an hour of transit time in getting to the city” noted then-Qantas International CEO Tino La Spina at the time.

Qantas’ lounge options at Haneda

A Qantas spokesperson confirmed the permanent closure of its Tokyo Narita lounge to Executive Traveller, adding that “flights to the airline’s Tokyo hub of Haneda are scheduled to recommence in late March and Qantas is currently undergoing a review of lounge options for flights departing the inner-city airport.”

Those options nominally fall in the lap of Oneworld partners Japan Airlines and Cathay Pacific, both of which offer excellent lounges at Haneda, although Cathay Pacific’s Haneda lounge remains closed along with most other Cathay lounges worldwide. 

Japan Airlines maintains two flagship lounges at Haneda – the JAL First Class Lounge and the Sakura business class lounge, with the latter currently closed.

The airline reopened its Singapore Business Lounge, Los Angeles Business Lounge and London Heathrow Lounge as flights to each destination resumed, with the first class lounges at Singapore and Los Angeles expected to roll out the welcome mat in the coming months. 

As for Narita, the downstairs space occupied by the Qantas lounge will soon host a new Aspire lounge from Swissport.

Slated to open by mid-2022, Swissport says its first Aspire Lounge in Asia will be “inspired by Japanese nature, style, and culture” and “provide a unique and relaxing experience for visitors.” 

Features will include a bar and buffet, a business zone for working and a "relaxation room”, with “natural sounds” and the scents of aromatic oils wafting gently through the 720m2 space.