Air New Zealand looks to expand Sydney Airport

By David Flynn, February 11 2011

Air New Zealand is working on plans to boost the size of its Koru Club Lounge at Sydney Airport’s T1 International Terminal.

The lounge is used by AirNZ passengers as well as passengers on Star Alliance airlines (Air Canada, Austrian, Thai Airways and United Airlines) travelling in business or first class or with Gold Status.

Also up for entry are premium passengers of Gulf Air and Korean Air and, starting this week, Virgin Blue and V Australia business class travellers and those holding Velocity Gold status.

That can make things a bit crowded at times, admits Cam Wallace, Air New Zealand’s General Manager Australia. “We have to make sure we have the appropriate capacity with the numbers going through the lounge.”

Wallace told Australian Business Traveller that the Kiwi flag-carrier is looking into several ways to expand the Koru Club Lounge to cope with the increased traffic – which is expected to grow even more when Virgin Blue and Air New Zealand begin promoting their trans-Tasman partnership and new shared schedules in the second half of this year.

“We’re investigating a couple of options, we’ll evaluate them over the next three or four months and work with Sydney Airport to determine what’s viable” Wallace says.

“When you walk into the Koru lounge today and turn right there’s the old first class area which we currently only use at peak times or when an organisation wants to book it off. So we could go through the wall and really open that up for everyone. We just have to see how much more capacity this would it give us, it’s more about finding the best way to use the space, so we’re working through that at the moment.”

The office area allocated to PCs could also make way for more seats, Wallace says.

“My observation is that the office area in Sydney is empty most of the time” he told Australian Business Traveller. “That area was set up when people used to log on to desktop PCs but these days most people are using laptops or iPads connected to our wireless network.”

“So we could look at taking that down and expanding the lounge into that area as well."