A new airport lounge-restaurant hybrid concept is coming to Australia in 2025. The Plaza Premium Group is already well known across Asia and Down Under for its range of airport lounges and services. But it thinks it’s onto a winner with its latest initiative: its first domestic lounge in Australia – and equally importantly, the debut of its Flight Club brand in the Oceania region – at Adelaide Airport.
In a recent interview with Karryon in Australia, Plaza Premium Group CEO Song Hoi-See said that the group’s usual strategy is to “observe any inefficiency gaps, so we can fill it”. And it believes it has found one – within Australian domestic airports.
According to Song, the first Australian Flight Club at Adelaide Airport will be open to any travellers, but is especially geared towards those who don’t require the more traditional lounge experience – and the price tag that normally accompanies that.
And with only “10 to 15 per cent” of passengers flying in premium classes, he said there is an opportunity to cater for the rest of the market.
“They need these services as well”, he says, as just because they can’t afford to fly business class, “it doesn’t mean they do not require these kinds of services.”
“They cannot be first or business class in the air, but they can be first or business class in the airport.”
Song believes that the new airport lounge concept will particularly appeal to road warriors on a budget.
“A lot of frequent travellers are business travellers”, he says. So Flight Club has also been designed “to cater for this group of people who require a place to work” with a “good quality of service”.
“That is the reason we set up this concept.”
As for the name, which might evoke a 1990s Brad Pitt film of an entirely different vibe, the PPG boss says it was created to avoid confusion with the group’s signature Plaza Premium Lounge brand.
How they differ
According to Song, the products are “a bit different, because PPG [lounges] have longer times in the lounge… maybe up to 1.5 hours”.
But in Flight Club, visits “average only half an hour, maybe 45 minutes or a maximum of one hour”.
“So you must provide services to meet their requirement. For example, food-wise, you must provide what you would call, handy food, where you can have it and move, rather than wait for cooking,” he says.
“Passengers don’t have the time.”
Song adds the new brand also prioritises local produce.
“We don’t care about French wine… we want to put in Australian wine and beer”.
And then there’s the pay-as-you-enter system.
Beyond airport lounges
Overall, the PPG chief executive says he is “very positive about the Australian market”.
In fact, he’s so confident that he thinks the group’s meet and greet services, which are already popular throughout Asia, could make their way to Australia. This would be particularly useful for inbound tourism.
“We believe that it is only a matter of time before [Australian] governments release the meet and greet services to passengers, especially business travellers,” he says.
By that, he means a service that welcomes passengers “like business travellers and students” at a gate to “whiz them through immigration and customs”.
“That would be very convenient for them,” he adds.
Aerotel turns two
Two years from making its Australian debut, the Aerotel hotel brand – another distinctive PPG initiative that offers rooms at an hourly fee instead of an overnight rate – is also going strong.
“To give you some idea of how well we are doing… although we have a small number of rooms [15] in Sydney, we are doing 120% occupancy,” Song says.
“That’s the reason we keep on asking Sydney Airport for more room!”
Plaza Premium Group would also be “happy to build an Aerotel in Melbourne, but the concern is the space”.
Until then, it will continue focusing on what it does best.
“CCV [convenience, comfort and value] is always our philosophy… [but] we want to come up with so-called crazy ideas,” Song says.
If Flight Club redefines domestic airport lounges Down Under, it won’t seem like such a crazy concept.
