Penang International Airport is not a big airport. It handles a mix of domestic and international traffic, but the international departures hall is compact, and the lounge options reflect that. If you’re flying out on an international flight and want somewhere to sit that isn’t a plastic gate seat, the Plaza Premium Lounge is essentially your only option.
We visited the lounge on an evening departure, arriving about two hours before our flight. Here’s what we found.
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Location and access
After clearing security and immigration, the international departures area is small enough that you’ll find the lounge without trying. Head towards Gate A3, and you’ll spot the escalator going up to the mezzanine floor almost immediately. The lounge entrance is at the top.
The Plaza Premium Lounge at Penang is open daily from 6am to 12am, which covers virtually every international departure from the airport.
Access is available to Priority Pass members (two-hour stay), as well as premium cabin passengers on a number of airlines that use Plaza Premium as their contract lounge, including Cathay Pacific, Qatar Airways, Emirates, and Starlux, among others. You can also buy a walk-in pass directly from Plaza Premium.
Given that this is the only proper lounge in the international terminal, it can serve a fairly mixed crowd. On the afternoon we visited, it was busy but manageable.
Layout
The lounge measures 2,700 sqft and is split into two distinct areas: an interior section and an exterior section.
Interior
The interior is what you walk into first. Directly ahead are a series of booth-style seats along the walls, which are on the smaller side but fine for a solo traveller or a couple not carrying too much hand luggage.
Beyond the booths, there are sofa seats scattered around the space. The overall footprint is compact. If you’ve been to larger Plaza Premium lounges in Hong Kong or KL, manage your expectations accordingly.
The interior is also where you’ll find all the power points. These are universal outlets, which is a nice touch given the mix of travellers passing through. If you need to charge your devices, you’ll want to grab an interior seat.
Exterior
The exterior seating area is split into two sections. One is nominally designated for Cathay Pacific passengers, though during our visit it seemed to be open to everyone, including Priority Pass holders.
The other section, roped off across from it, appeared to be reserved for Qatar Airways passengers.
The exterior seats generally don’t have power outlets, so if you’re just looking to sit and wait without needing to charge anything, this is fine. Otherwise, stick to the interior.
Food and drinks
For a lounge this size, the food offering is surprisingly decent. There’s a mix of buffet items and a made-to-order noodle station, and most of the food is concentrated in the interior section of the lounge.
The noodle station offers two options: a signature curry laksa and a vegetarian mushroom noodle soup. Both are made to order. We tried the curry laksa. It was okay for an airport lounge, with a reasonably rich broth and enough heft to count as a proper meal before a flight. But it’s not really Assam laksa, which I would’ve expected given we are in Penang.
The hot and cold buffet covers the basics. The hot buffet selection includes ayam masak mamak, stir-fried vegetables, carbonara pasta and fried noodles, which very closely resembled Penang char koay teow.
There was porridge with condiments, black glutinous rice porridge, and a cold shelf with salads. Nothing extraordinary, but enough variety that you won’t go hungry.
The drinks station has Nescafé, Milo, teh tarik, and BOH tea. No barista-made coffee here. There’s also a small selection of cold drinks.
Beer is also complimentary and must be requested at the AeroBar, whereas other types of alcohol are not free.
The exterior section has its own smaller food setup, skewing more towards breakfast items. Think bread and jam, cereal, soya milk, and fried dough fritters (youtiao). If you’re arriving early in the morning, this is probably what you’ll gravitate towards first.
Here’s how the made-to-order signature curry laksa looked like.
Amenities
Keep expectations modest here. There are no showers. The washroom is small, but clean, and stocks Urban Skincare Co. amenities, which was a pleasant detail for a lounge of this size. That’s about it for amenities. No nap rooms, no workstations beyond the seats themselves, and not even the distinctive Plaza Premium honeycomb seats.
Concluding thoughts
The Plaza Premium Lounge at Penang is fine. It does what it needs to do, and not much more. The curry laksa from the noodle station is the highlight, the interior seating is comfortable enough for a short wait, and the washroom amenities are a nice touch.
But this is not a lounge worth arriving early for. If your flight is in 90 minutes and you want somewhere quieter than the gate area to sit and have a coffee, it serves that purpose. If you’re expecting anything resembling what Plaza Premium offers at its flagship locations in Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur, you’ll be disappointed.
The interior can get busy, but during our visit it never felt uncomfortably crowded. The bigger issue is simply the size of the space. For what is effectively the only lounge option in Penang’s international terminal, it feels undersized for the volume of airlines now using it as a contract lounge. With Emirates, Qatar Airways, Cathay Pacific, and Starlux all funnelling their premium passengers here, it’s only going to get more stretched.
It’s your only option, and it’s an acceptable one. Just don’t plan your airport timing around it.
