Incheon to Taipei: Taoyuan & Incheon Airport Lounges + Asiana Business Class Review

 Singapore

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Tips for Star Alliance Passengers at Incheon & Taoyuan Airports

For our recent trip to Singapore, the direct flight from Incheon (ICN) to Singapore Changi (SIN) takes about six hours. It’s a competitive route. Korean Air and Asiana operate it on the Korean side, Singapore Airlines is almost always near the top of those “best airlines in the world” lists, and there’s a long bench of LCCs from both countries — Jeju Air, T’way, and Scoot among them.

Six hours isn’t really a long-haul flight, so most travelers take one of the direct options. But I wanted to try Singapore Airlines business class on this trip, and the only award availability I could find on miles was on an Incheon to Taipei routing connecting onward to Singapore. So I booked that instead. The outbound leg ended up taking twelve hours including the layover, and the return leg about eight and a half. For what’s normally a six-hour flight.

I’d never deliberately taken a longer routing just to try a particular airline’s business class before, and I worried it would feel like a waste of time. Honestly, parts of it did. But the whole experience also turned out to be more fun than I’d expected. I’m one of those people who genuinely enjoys the journey itself — airports, planes, the in-between time — so once in a while, a routing like this isn’t a bad idea.

Star Alliance Lounges at Incheon Terminal 1

Incheon Terminal 1 has four lounges worth knowing about: the Asiana Business Lounge, Singapore Airlines’ SilverKris Lounge, the Matina Lounge, and the SkyHub Lounge.

If you like open, airy spaces, Asiana Lounge is the most spacious. If you’re there mainly for the food, Matina is the strongest pick. If you want a balanced experience of food and ambience, SilverKris is the move. And if you’re flying late at night or in the early morning, SkyHub matches that timing best.

Matina and SkyHub are both accessible via The Lounge Members access, a paid program, so they tend to get extremely crowded — with wait times to enter at most popular hours. If you’re flying Star Alliance business and have the choice between Asiana and SilverKris, I’d personally pick SilverKris.

SilverKris Lounge at Incheon operates on three time windows: 06:15-11:00, 13:45-16:25, and 08:50-23:30. The hours appear to be aligned with Singapore Airlines’ Incheon-Singapore flight schedule, so they occasionally shift depending on the day’s flights.

In terms of size, SilverKris is much smaller than the Asiana Lounge. But the food and drink quality is on a different level. The menu is varied, the food is consistently good, and there are dedicated staff for the bar and the coffee station, which makes for a more comfortable experience than the typical self-service setup. As a small bonus, SilverKris serves laksa and kaya toast — two staples of Singaporean cuisine — which always feels like a nice preview when you’re heading to Singapore.

Our son is a picky eater, so he only had bananas and milk that morning. My husband and I, on the other hand, had a full early breakfast. My favorite item on a previous visit had been the tuna tataki, but that had been replaced with salmon this time around — a small disappointment. We tried the shakshuka, sausages, chicken salad, and an Indian curry, all of which were good. There are a few Korean items on the menu as well for travelers who prefer something more familiar. The menu rotates periodically.

The cocktail list is one of the small pleasures of this lounge. There are a few Singapore Airlines-themed cocktails — the SilverKris Sling, the Kris Club — along with mocktails like the Kris Fizz and Kris Babe. I’ve been working through them on each visit. Last time I had the SilverKris Sling, which tasted very juice-forward. This time I tried the Kris Club, which I liked much better. And of course they serve the classic Singapore Sling, which is worth trying at least once.

While we were eating, I remembered something I’d been meaning to do: stop by the Asiana Lounge next door, possibly for the last time.

Asiana, a Star Alliance member, is being merged with Korean Air over a two-year transition that started in 2025. By 2026, Asiana is expected to move to Incheon Terminal 2, and its Star Alliance membership will end, which most likely means the Asiana Business Lounge in Terminal 1 will close along with it. Since our next trip is booked in Singapore Airlines economy, this felt like the last realistic chance to see the place before it disappears.

The Asiana Business Lounge has three sections — East, West, and Central — and the total space is genuinely vast. The downside is that all Star Alliance passengers are funneled here, so it’s also the most crowded, and the food is the weakest of the Terminal 1 lounges by some margin.

I first visited in 2023, and at the time I remember thinking, *is this really a business class lounge?* Two years later, the menu hasn’t really changed, and the quality has held flat. With the merger looming, I suspect they’ve stopped investing in it. The drink selection is decent but there’s no dedicated bar staff like at SilverKris. What it does have is the most seating variety, the best view of the planes outside, and the kind of open, airy feeling that the smaller lounges can’t really replicate.

So if I had to choose between the two, I’d still go with SilverKris. But walking through the Asiana Lounge knowing it’s probably about to disappear gave the visit a slightly bittersweet quality.

Incheon to Taipei on Asiana Business Class (OZ711, A380)

Once boarding time rolled around, we headed to the gate and I let our son watch the plane for a bit. The aircraft for Incheon to Taipei was an A380-800 — a four-engine, double-decker giant. It’s the kind of plane that burns so much fuel and needs such high passenger loads to break even that airlines have struggled to make it work, and it’s gradually being retired across most fleets after 2030. I’d never flown on a double-decker before, so I was honestly a little excited.

Asiana’s upper deck on this aircraft is split between Business Smartium and Economy. There are 66 business class seats in this configuration, which is generous. Asiana’s fleet skews older, and on most short and medium-haul routes you end up on an A330 with their “slide-style” recliner seats — the ones that tip backward at an angle rather than going truly flat. The A380, though, also serves long-haul routes to the US, so the seats on this flight were proper staggered fully-flat business seats.

After getting up at 5 a.m., our son fell asleep during taxiing. As soon as the seatbelt sign came off after takeoff, I reclined his seat fully so he could keep sleeping. Since he hadn’t eaten in the lounge, I’d been hoping he’d at least try the in-flight meal, but he was out cold for the entire flight.

I’d already overeaten at the lounge and was planning to skip the meal myself, but eel donburi was on the menu, so I decided to try it. The scallop salad was actually quite good. The eel donburi was decent without being memorable. The dessert looked nicer than it tasted. As business class meals go, it was on the underwhelming side, but for a two-hour flight it felt about right.

A two-hour flight in business class is mostly takeoff, meal, and prep for landing. There’s barely time to lie down. The Incheon to Taipei leg ended quickly. With so many business seats on this aircraft, the cabin felt a bit closer to premium economy than to a proper biz cabin. But the A380 itself was the experience I’d come for, and getting to fly it once before it disappears entirely was a small bonus.

EVA Infinity Lounge at Taoyuan Airport

On the return leg, our connection at Taipei Taoyuan was only about two hours, so we headed straight to the lounge.

Taiwan has three full-service carriers, which is unusually generous for a country its size: China Airlines (SkyTeam), EVA Air (Star Alliance), and Starlux (Oneworld). All three are well-regarded. Since I was flying Star Alliance, I went to EVA Air’s lounge.

EVA Air operates four lounges at Taoyuan, arranged by access tier.

The Garden is EVA’s top-tier lounge, reserved for Diamond cardholders in their Infinity MileageLands program. The Infinity is the business-class lounge — open to Royal Laurel, Premium Laurel, and Business Class passengers, as well as Star Alliance partners in First or Business class. The Star is for elite frequent flyers, including Gold cardholders in EVA’s own program and Star Alliance Gold members on partner airlines. The Club is for EVA’s Silver-tier cardholders.

For me, that meant The Infinity. All four lounges are conveniently located on Level 4 of Terminal 2, alongside the food court area, so finding it was easy.

Walking in, my first impression was honestly mild surprise — for a full-service airline’s business class lounge, it felt a little dated. And the location was strange. No windows facing the planes, just an inward-facing view of the airport interior from a portion of the seating. I’d expected the prime airport real estate that FSC lounges usually get. Instead, it felt closed-in on all sides, and the relatively tight seat spacing added to that feeling.

We weren’t particularly hungry — we’d eaten well on the Asiana flight — so I didn’t try most of the food. Our son hadn’t touched his in-flight meal, though, so we set him up for dinner here. The menu was actually more varied than I’d expected for such a tight space, with a solid range of Taiwanese dishes and a decent dessert spread.

He ate the Taiwanese-style braised pork over rice and beef noodle soup, along with the pickled daikon side, and ate enthusiastically — which is rare for him. Across our entire Singapore trip, the second-best meal he had was here at the EVA Infinity Lounge, after only the satay at Lau Pa Sat. He’s a kid who mostly survives on fruit and yogurt while traveling, so seeing him eat real food was a small win.

My husband and I weren’t hungry, but I did try the make-your-own bubble tea station, and I loved it. I really like bubble tea but find that ordering from a shop usually means committing to a full-sized drink I won’t finish. Being able to mix exactly the amount I wanted was perfect. There were also pavé chocolates on the dessert table that looked excellent — the kind of thing you’d pair with wine or coffee — though I was too full to enjoy them properly.

After his big dinner, our son had a yogurt, then a Häagen-Dazs ice cream, then a shower before the flight. I didn’t get a photo of the shower facilities, but I’ll note: even though EVA had more shower rooms than SilverKris, SilverKris’s were noticeably better in terms of design and comfort, particularly when bathing a child. The EVA staff, on the other hand, were attentive, circulating regularly to clean and maintain the facilities. The lounge is clearly well-managed even if the design feels a bit tired.

Overall, would I say I disliked the EVA Infinity Lounge? Not at all. The actual space is smaller than SilverKris, but SilverKris feels more open thanks to the windows and ceiling height. The shower count favors EVA, but the actual shower experience and the kid-friendliness favor SilverKris. The food menus are both varied enough that either choice would be fine. For a business-class lounge at a full-service airline, the EVA Infinity Lounge feels a little underwhelming, and a refresh would do it good. Then again, compared to Incheon’s neglected Asiana Lounge, it’s still in noticeably better shape.

Taipei to Incheon on Asiana Business Class (A330-300)

The aircraft for the return flight from Taipei to Incheon was a 10-year-old A330-300. The outbound had been the A380 with full-flat seats; this time we were on the slide-style recliner. I’d known going in that the A330 was the more likely aircraft for shorter routes, but I’d been hoping for another A380. A small disappointment.

The 2-2-2 seat layout meant our son and I sat together, and my husband took the seat behind us. Unfortunately, the passenger directly in front of our son turned out to be very sensitive, and we had a rough flight because of it. Our son wasn’t crying. He was watching cartoons relatively quietly. But he occasionally said things like “we’re going up!” during takeoff, or laughed too loudly at something on his screen, and the passenger in front of him visibly bristled every time.

I kept trying to keep him quiet, even handing him candy to slow the talking, but there’s only so much you can do with a small child on a two-hour flight. Toward the end I was just grateful it was a short flight. This was my son’s twelfth time on a plane and the first time we’d had this kind of situation, and I was so flustered in the moment that I didn’t think clearly. In retrospect, I should have asked the flight attendants to mediate.

I was still too full from the lounge to eat anything substantial, and the meal options for this short flight didn’t really appeal anyway. I left most of it untouched and had a small glass of wine. By the time we landed at Incheon I was completely drained — partly from the long routing, partly from the stress of the flight, and partly from sheer tiredness.

Final Thoughts on Asiana Business Class

For some context on my baseline: I’ve flown FSC business class about five times with Asiana — Jakarta-Incheon round-trip, Bangkok-Incheon one-way, and now Incheon-Taipei round-trip — and three times with foreign carriers, on Thai Airways from Incheon to Bangkok and Singapore Airlines from Taipei to Singapore round-trip. All of these are short to medium-haul, so my comparison set is limited. But even with that caveat, the gap between Asiana business class and what other carriers are doing on similar routes felt pretty clear by the end of this trip.

Business class as a category is rapidly evolving — with newer seats, better in-flight entertainment, and more thoughtful service across most airlines I’ve tried. Asiana feels increasingly stuck with older recliners, dated IFE, and a service experience that’s quietly getting worse. With the Korean Air merger on the horizon, this is most likely the last Asiana business class review I’ll ever write.