Korean Air is redefining the airport lounge as a new expression of luxury hospitality

Inside Korean Air’s new lounge network at Incheon International Airport Terminal 2, David Pacey, the airline’s executive vice president and chief of in-flight service and lounges, is talking beans, baristas and the exacting standards of Seoul’s café culture. He tells a story about buying Panama Geisha green beans during the World Barista Championships, then struggling to find anyone willing to roast them. The risk was too high; the beans too expensive. Eventually, he met the woman who would train him as a certified barista.

The coffee is a metaphor. Pacey’s story is really about standards: the patience to source the right ingredients, the insistence on finding the right expertise, the refusal to cut corners simply because nobody else would notice. That is the logic behind Korean Air’s new lounges, a kind of operational fussiness elevated into brand language.

For Korean Air, the lounge has become the fastest way to show what the airline wants to become. In 2025, following its acquisition of a two-thirds stake in Asiana Airlines, the airline unveiled a major brand makeover – its first since 1984. The refresh embraced a cleaner, more contemporary aesthetic, centred on Korean Air’s signature spectrum of blue as its most distinctive visual cue. The new lounges follow suit.

‘We wanted to be world-class,’ says Pacey. ‘Whether that was from the design concept, the fit-out, the food and beverage experience, the customer service, delivery – we want to be world-class in whatever we do.’

The figures reiterate his point. Following a 42-month, KRW 110 billion overhaul of its lounge network at Terminal 2, Korean Air has expanded its footprint from 5,105 to 12,270 sq m, while seating capacity has grown from 898 to 1,566. There are now seven lounges across the terminal, from First Class and Miler Club to Prestige East, Prestige West and the two Garden lounges.

Pacey is refreshingly blunt about what came before. The old lounges, he says, were ‘very vanilla’. One-dimensional. Too open. Too white. Chairs lined up in a space that, in passenger feedback, could feel like ‘a really large doctor’s waiting room’. With the overhaul, Korean Air wanted to attempt something more pointed: to make the hours before departure feel like part of the airline, not an airport-administered prelude to it. Pacey describes the ambition as creating ‘a lounge at the airport as opposed to an airport lounge.’

A Korean sense of place

The First Class Lounge is the most concentrated expression of that idea. At 921 sq m, it is 2.3 times larger than before, arranged around an open hall and 11 private suites. Guests enter as they would an upscale restaurant. Rather than helping themselves from a buffet, they can settle in, read or work while meals are prepared to order from an à la carte menu and served at a properly laid table using Bernardaud porcelain, Christofle cutlery and Baccarat glassware. Menu highlights include Wando abalone seaweed porridge and wild mushroom galbitang. Guests can also retreat to Ceragem massage chairs, shower suites stocked with Aesop amenities, or dedicated relaxation spaces.

The other top category is the Miler Club. Designed for Korean Air’s most frequent travellers – elite SkyPass members and regular long-haul flyers – the lounge balances efficiency with comfort. Guests have access to live cooking stations preparing made-to-order dishes, a dedicated bakery, barista-made coffee, a full-service bar, shower suites and a variety of seating zones.

Meanwhile, the Prestige Class West Lounge operates under heavier pressure. At 2,615 sq m and with more than 420 seats, it is the largest single lounge facility at Incheon International Airport. It is a workhorse, as Pacey puts it, designed to handle the intense morning departure banks when hundreds of travellers may pass through in a short window. Yet the room does not read as one vast field of seating. Here too are distinct zones for dining, working and resting, with changes in furniture, lighting and circulation that create a sequence of smaller environments.

Throughout the lounges, Grand Hyatt Incheon chefs, under the direction of Kim Sea-kyeong, Korean Air’s culinary consultant and owner-chef of Seoul’s lauded Cesta restaurant, prepare dishes on-site, with menus spanning Korean comfort staples such as tteokguk, a warming rice-cake soup, and janchi guksu, delicate wheat noodles served in a light broth, while fresh gimbap is rolled throughout the day – around 1,000 rolls daily. Western favourites are also well represented, alongside soft-serve ice cream stations, speciality coffee and a full bar service.

The noodle programme has become a particular point of pride. As Pacey recalls, the airline was once asked by a ratings agency why a major Asian carrier lacked a noodle bar. The response is now unmistakable. Noodles have become a signature feature of the lounge experience, culminating in the Prestige East Left Lounge’s Ramyeon Library, where passengers can select instant noodle varieties, customise them with toppings and prepare them using automated cooking machines.

For the design, Korean Air worked with LTW Designworks, the Singapore-based hospitality studio behind luxury hotel and resort projects for brands including Four Seasons, Aman and Park Hyatt, with design director Teo Su Seam shaping an interior language that resists the usual airport-lounge shorthand.

‘We weren’t interested in creating a themed interpretation of Korea,’ says Teo. ‘Instead, we looked at the underlying principles of Korean architecture – the relationship between openness and enclosure, the idea of the courtyard, and the way spaces gradually reveal themselves as you move through them.’

Teo points to the hanok – the traditional Korean house – as a key reference for the way it organises space, light and movement. The logic of the courtyard became an organising principle, creating a central gathering point from which more intimate corners, dining areas and places to work or rest naturally branch out. Spaces expand into bright, open volumes before narrowing into more enclosed settings, creating a rhythm of openness and retreat. The result is a lounge that accommodates the shifting states of travel.

Those ideas are translated through a series of subtle cultural references rather than overt symbols. Hangul, the Korean writing system, is abstracted into texture and pattern. Ancient Korean coins inform geometric motifs, while the moon jar – a celebrated form of Korean white porcelain – appears through proportion and curve. In the Miler Club, ramie bojagi, traditional patchwork wrapping cloths, inspire a richer palette of purple, rust, blue and lavender, while engineered wood columns add warmth and texture.

Each lounge has its own mood. First Class moves through natural wood, earth tones, oxblood accents and gold leaf details, with references to pottery and lacquerware. Prestige introduces a sharper conversation between technology and tactility: polished stainless steel columns, walnut, blue tones drawn from the airline’s identity, softer furniture for dining, working and resting. The F&B areas set engineered wood against metal, warmth against precision, table against aircraft.

Hanji, the traditional Korean paper prized for its texture and durability, was explored as a potential wall material, but airport fire regulations made the literal application impossible. The idea survived as a Hangul-inspired wallcovering in the First Class Lounge, where characters are turned into architectural texture.

‘The goal was not to tell guests they were in Korea,’ says Teo. ‘It was to create a feeling that is distinctly Korean without relying on obvious symbols. We wanted the cultural references to be discovered rather than announced.’

For Korean Air, Incheon is not the endpoint. Pacey calls it the ‘mother concept’ for the airline’s wider lounge strategy. The rollout is already underway in the United States, where the new lounge at Los Angeles International Airport opened earlier this year, translating the same DNA into something more horizontal, open and garden-like, with warm tones and a Southern Californian ease. New York will follow, taking the concept in a taller, darker and more urban direction with black marble, dark wood and brass.

As my tour with Pacey concludes in Cooking Studio L’atelier – a space where lounge guests can make Valrhona chocolate bark with Grand Hyatt Incheon chefs, adding sweets from a wall of glass jars – I can’t help but think that Pacey is to Korean Air what Willy Wonka is to his chocolate factory: not in the top hat sense, but as the executive who seems to know every machine, ingredient and secret door in his own factory.

koreanair.com