Review: ANA Suite Lounge Tokyo Narita

What an awesome view of the Thai A380 from the ANA first class lounge!!! Pretty cool you got to see it arrive and get ready for your departure.

I thought the food selection in The ANA Suites Lounge was rather poor.

A few points:

It's "Suite Lounge", not "Suites Lounge".

In Japanese, "thank you for waiting" (お待たせ致しました) is a fairly standard way to apologize for making a customer wait, regardless of the duration. (In Japan, the customer is at a higher level than than the one serving said customer.)

I'm surprised you didn't try the chicken curry!

@ tyoflyer -- Thanks, didn't realize it was "Suite" and not "Suites." Updated the post.

i miss the donuts they once had in the past. I know you sometimes take issue with them, but i really like the ANA lounges in NRT, i guess because i love the noodle bar, the soup, and they are just so damn friendly.

you need to understand the JApanese culture before you emphasize the "sorry" and thank you for waiting! It's the culture that you don't understand and not appreciate!
It's what they say in Japanese as well, so it's all direct translation.
would you rather they say "GO"?
Time is very precious in Japan, to the second.
so when Shinkansen is delayed by a minute, everyone at the station and on the train for apologize. you don't understand this, but as you may have seen, everything runs precisely with a time schedule, so to miss by a minute might cause other things to be delayed or missed. So please stop criticizing these things over and over again in your post. I enjoy and appreciate reading your posts and writing, but lately there are so much negative words and thoughts.
But thank you.

Not bad, it is an improvement from the last time that I've used few years back. The food selection was close to nothing.

I think the reason the ANA F lounge is so crowded is that UA F pax in the know -- know where to go!

I was greeted with "Thank you for waiting" this weekend when I walked up to a register at the 7-11 down in Izu... it's totally a throwaway phrase, but found it particularly amusing given your posts about it this trip.

I agree with iv and the food selection was poor. I was in this lounge last month.

I love the photo of the cleaning crew boarding the A380!

Thanks for the report Ben. I fly ANA all the time, but have never managed to get into the F lounge. Weird to see that apart from being less crowded it doesn't seem to be any better than the normal lounge...

Also, the 'thank you for waiting' thing is particular to ANA. I presume it's in their staff manual or something. As yet another Ben mentions above, it's a mistranslation of お待たせ致しました that doesn't work in English. Still, it's a cute quirk, right?

love your posts. the Japanese are an interesting culture. Having been born there, educated and then uneducated in the US college system, its kinda weird. then again, so are most cultures right? they will say things to be polite like.. Thanks to you. (okage sama de). and I will be like..wait..should i say that back to you even if you had nothing to do with it? polite yes, proper? hhmmnn.. dont need flames so I will let sociologists deal with that one. I asked my GF (who is a Chief purser for NH) and about language in the manual and she said.. Baka.. you dont need it to be in the manual. no wonder you look japanese but think western..sheesh. (roll the eyes)

Every time I read comments about this aspect of Japanese culture, it makes me very curious to experience it myself because I thought that Americans are sometimes viewed by other cultures as being overly apologetic/nice (mostly in a sincere way but sometimes not).

Perhaps, it's because I've mostly lived in the south of the US, but people are generally very polite and throw around "I'm sorry" and "Excuse me" way too much, even when a situation doesn't call for it or it's not their fault. And I think many foreigners probably find a typical greeting ("How are you?") weird because it's kind of a rhetorical question that, generally, can be answered by a single phrase ("Fine...and you?").

P.S. Aforementioned politeness is balanced out by interactions with some bureaucratic establishments like DPS 😉

One of my favorite parts of flying ANA was after pushback, the ground crew lined up, and waves goodbye to the flight.

Is this something they do on every flight?

@ Scott -- Yep, sure is!

I was a bit disappointed when I had my first opportunity to use this lounge instead of the one downstairs I use when flying ex-NRT, even on UA because of the noodle bar and the massage chairs behind the black scrum. (If you really miss these chairs, do what I did and buy one for your den! One of the best $3K -- regularly $5K but on sale -- I've ever spent!! My friends seem to agree...to the extent that two have already bought their own!!!) But I digress. The bar offerings were hardly premium (benchmarks being an XO cognac and at least JW Blue, both absent).

I had an opportunity on my return through NRT to use the JL First lounge(s) and there was little comparison. The upper level lounge was spacious and well provisioned, though I found the lower level one, which has the showers and massage facilities, very crowded. (And yes, there are massage chairs in the upper lounge, but having real masseuses is a tough thing to beat...)

So I found the OZ First lounge rather disappointing, with few of the amenities one would expect of a home base facility.

I'm trying to connect NH5 to TG677, but they're saying it's not legal. Is 65 minutes long enough to connect in your experience with any F escort?

@ E -- The minimum connection time at NRT for ANA to Thai is 60 minutes, so that should be legal.

So I was always curious about the shower rooms in lounges... Does a married couple normally share a room or does each person get their own room to themselves?

@ Ken -- Given that the shower rooms are fairly small and that they usually have plenty, people usually get their own. Not sure if it's prohibited to share one or not, though.

Gotcha, thanks. I wonder if it's prohibited.

Hey Ben! I flew out of Tokyo a couple of months ago on Alitalia and was in the delta lounge that they have there. I found it to be one of the most pleasant and rather large, and was wondering if you've visited it, and what your thoughts were if you had. Happy new year!

Hi Lucky,
I'm a US frequent flyer and transited frequently through Narita for the past 10+ years flying from North America to Asia. Whenever I get Premier Gold status or upgraded to Business Class, I only knew to go to the crowded United Club lounge (which has hundreds of passengers at any one time), but I'm happy I recently discovered I can use ANA Suite lounge (Star Alliance). It is smaller, but far less crowded. Even though some complain the food selection is bad, I think food selection is better than the UA lounge if you like Japanese food and you don't have to line up or wait for food to be replenished like in United's lounge. And there's always 3 or more sake to try if you like sake. Internet connection are far faster due to low bandwidth in the ANA lounge vs United. Shower facilities are decent (shorter wait time versus United), although I think the shower gel/shampoo could be better.

It’s funny that they allow many UA customers in yet denying their own arriving F customers connecting with other airlines.