Star Alliance eyes new lounge, airline co-location at Hong Kong T2

Star Alliance hopes to bring all of its member airlines together into a single terminal at Hong Kong and could open its own Star-branded lounge similar to those at Los Angeles, Paris and Buenos Aires.

The alliance’s preference will be to take a ‘clean sheet’ approach with the new-build Terminal 2 Concourse, as Cathay Pacific intends to stay put at Terminal 1.

“Certainly our expectation and our hope is that we will co-locate together to whichever terminal it is,” Star Alliance CEO Jeffrey Goh told Australian Business Traveller on the sidelines of last week's IATA aviation summit in Sydney.

“Other than achieving efficiencies in check-in, gate availability and transfer counters, co-location means when you are connecting from one Star Alliance flight to another you don’t have to run 2½ miles to connect in the 45 minutes that you have.”

Goh indicated this could also see a single Star Alliance lounge to be shared between airlines.

”You don’t want to end up with one lounge at one end go the terminal and another at the other end of the terminal, so there’s a lot of co-location opportunities.”

In the short-term, Goh says that with Terminal 2 is closed next year to allow construction of the T2 Concourse extension, “we are trying to find ways of co-existing within T1.”

“The constraints of the physical space means we have to find technology-based ways of serving the customers like automated checkin and bag drops and so on, so being co-located within a certain section of T1 will help optimise that efficiency."

David Flynn

David Flynn is the Editor-in-Chief of Executive Traveller and a bit of a travel tragic with a weakness for good coffee, shopping and lychee martinis.