Reflections on a conversation with Janis Tse, CEO of Lounge by YATES+

There are conversations that confirm what you already suspected, and then there are conversations that sharpen your thinking in ways you did not quite expect. My recent podcast discussion with Janis Tse fell firmly into the second category.

Janis leads Lounge by YATES+, the guest experience consultancy arm of Yates+Partners, founded by Keith Yates, one of the most respected and quietly visionary figures in the guest experience world. Keith appeared on an earlier episode of this podcast and planted several ideas that I found myself still thinking about weeks later. Janis carries that same depth of thinking. She has spent the better part of 20 years working across aviation, hospitality, and brand strategy in over 30 countries, and Keith has been both a professional anchor and a genuine mentor to her along the way. She is someone who thinks deeply about spaces that most people pass through without much thought. And that, I found, is exactly the point.

The Design Problem Nobody Talks About Honestly

I have been using airline lounges for most of my working life. Forty years in Asia gave me a fairly clear picture of how these spaces evolved, and also of where they consistently fell short. The best way I could put it to Janis was this: many lounges have been designed the wrong way around. Architecture and aesthetics come first. Guest experience follows later, often as an afterthought.

She did not hesitate. She had seen it too many times.

The pattern she described is familiar to anyone who has worked in large organisations. A project team commissions an interior designer. The operations team comes in at the end. The food and beverage function sits somewhere in the middle, often disconnected from both.

Everyone is working in silos, and by the time the lounge opens, the fundamental question of how a guest actually moves through the space and what they genuinely need has never been properly answered.

What struck me about Janis's perspective was that this is not simply a design philosophy argument. It is a commercial one. A lounge where the buffet sits in the centre of the room pulls all foot traffic into one spot, creates congestion, and makes the rest of the space feel redundant. That is not a minor inconvenience. That is a failure of planning that costs money and costs guests. 

Food and Beverage as the Foundation

One of the most useful frameworks Janis shared was the idea that F&B should be the starting point for any lounge design, not an element to be fitted around the furniture. This might sound obvious, but in practice, it rarely happens that way.

Her argument is straightforward. A buffet no longer differentiates a lounge. Airport food courts have improved dramatically. Retail and dining options in major terminals are genuinely competitive. If a lounge cannot offer something that feels considered and personal, the traveller has better alternatives. 

What she advocates for is a set of distinct F&B concepts spread across the space, each serving a different type of guest. The solo business traveller who needs a quick glass of champagne and a working surface. The family with children who need something entirely different. The passenger with two hours to spare before a long-haul flight versus the one who wants to grab and go in 30 minutes. When you design around those actual human needs, the space organises itself more sensibly. Traffic flows better. Waste reduces. The experience becomes more personal.

The comparison that came to mind for me was the work that Super Potato did in Japan, and later the theatre kitchen concept that Shangri-La borrowed and adapted at their Singapore property. That idea of visible, live cooking, food made in front of you and to your order, is exactly the kind of thinking lounges have been slow to adopt. Janis agrees it is where things are heading.

The Cost Centre Conversation

There is a financial reality underneath all of this that does not get discussed enough in polite industry conversation. An airline lounge is, for most carriers, a cost centre. An independent lounge like Plaza Premium is a profit centre. Those two models require entirely different thinking, and yet they are increasingly expected to offer comparable experiences.

Janis made the case clearly. The airline lounge should be treated as a strategic business asset, not a budget line to be minimised. When planned properly, it contributes to loyalty, to revenue through upselling and tiered access, and to the kind of brand advocacy that no marketing spend can fully replicate. The three to five year return on investment horizon for a well-designed lounge is real. But it requires the C-suite to think about it that way from the outset.

The question of paid access is nuanced. Janis is not against it, but she is precise about how it should be managed. Open the lounge too widely and you dilute the experience for the passengers who matter most to the brand. The answer, she believes, is smart zoning: a single space that uses design and flow to create distinct environments for different tiers of guest, rather than a single undifferentiated room where everyone competes for the same seats.

It reminded me of something we worked through at Hotel Icon in Hong Kong, where the top floor lounge had to function as a breakfast space, a daytime working and dining area, and an evening cocktail lounge, all within the same footprint. Terence Conran's team solved it through intelligent zoning and a flexible design brief. The principle is identical.

Technology and the Risk of Losing the Human Element

On the subject of technology, Janis was measured in a way I found refreshing. There is a tendency in the industry to treat technology as the answer before the question has been properly asked. She does not see it that way.

The question she returns to is this: how do we make each guest feel genuinely heard, calm, and cared for? Technology can support that. It can enable staff to know a returning guest's preferences before they sit down. It can improve operational efficiency behind the scenes. But it cannot replace the moment when a member of staff notices that a guest looks stressed and decides to do something about it. 

She told a story from her own experience, travelling through Doha and losing a flask she cared about, arriving at the lounge tired and visibly deflated. The staff member who sat her down, took her details, and came back with a genuine effort to help did not find the flask. But the effect was immediate. She felt listened to. She felt less alone in the stress of travel. That, she said, is what a great lounge does that no technology can fully replicate. 

I believe that. I have seen it in hotels for 40 years. The moments that guests remember are rarely the ones planned in advance. 

Asian Hospitality and the Mindset Question

I put a question to Janis that I already had a sense of the answer to, but wanted to hear her articulate. Why do Asian airlines and lounges consistently lead in global rankings? Why do Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, and Japan Airlines keep winning?

Her answer was direct. It is the mindset. Not the systems, not the checklists, not even the training programmes. The underlying cultural orientation toward making the person in front of you feel genuinely looked after is what separates great hospitality from competent service. You can document it and teach around it, but you cannot manufacture it without working on how people think about their role.

This is something Yates+Partners works on at the leadership level. The belief is that meaningful change in guest experience starts with the mindset of the CEO and flows downward. Get the thinking right at the top, and the procedures follow naturally. Try to impose procedures without the thinking, and they become hollow. 

I have seen this play out in hotels repeatedly. The properties that deliver genuinely excellent guest experience are almost always led by people who care about it personally, not just commercially

Sustainability Done Properly

No serious industry conversation today avoids sustainability, but too many of them end up in the territory of aspiration without substance. Janis kept things practical. 

She made the case for removing plastic entirely from lounge operations, starting with bottle-free water stations, which she uses personally when she travels. She made the case for on-demand cooking over buffets, which reduces food waste significantly and improves the guest experience at the same time. And she pointed to the Pearl Lounge in Bahrain, a project her team designed from scratch, as an example of how natural light and shared terminal cooling systems can reduce energy consumption in meaningful ways without compromising the guest environment. 

The Pearl Lounge is now ranked among the top three in the world by APEX. That outcome is not in spite of its sustainable design. It is partly because of it.

We touched briefly on uniforms, which is an area I spent some time on at Hotel Icon. Working with Crestwell, we switched to sustainable fabrics made from materials including maize and bamboo. They were breathable, well-made, and the staff wore them with a sense of pride precisely because of what the choice represented. There is a culture signal in that kind of decision. When the team sees that leadership is serious about sustainability in the smallest details, it changes how they think about the larger ones.

Raising the Next Generation

One of the moments near the end of our conversation that stayed with me was when Janis mentioned that she had been invited back to guest lecture MBA students at the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at PolyU in Hong Kong. She spoke about it with real warmth. 

It matters. The people who will be designing and running lounges in ten years are sitting in those classrooms now. What they hear from practitioners, people who have actually done the work across different markets and cultures, shapes how they think about the problems they will eventually face. 

Janis has that kind of experience. She is not speaking in abstractions. She is drawing on 20 years of decisions made in real rooms, with real budgets, for real brands. That is what students need to hear. 

The Emotional Reality of Travel Stress

There was one area I wanted to explore that sits slightly outside the usual industry conversation, and it is the one that I think will resonate most with anyone who has ever stepped off a long flight and walked into a lounge feeling completely spent.

Travel is stressful. It has always been stressful and, regardless of how much the industry improves, it will remain so to some degree. The documents, the packing, the queues, the security process, the noise, the waiting, the uncertainty around delays and cancellations, and the fundamental vulnerability of being somewhere between where you were and where you are trying to get to. None of that disappears when you walk through a lounge door. 

I asked Janis directly: can a lounge genuinely make someone feel the way great hospitality does, calm, known, and at ease, or is travel stress simply unavoidable no matter how well-designed the space is?

Her answer was honest and personal. Travel is stressful, she said. She did not try to argue otherwise. But she was equally clear that a lounge can make a real difference to how a person moves through that stress, and the difference is not found in the furniture or the food offering. It is found in whether the person at the door sees you as an individual rather than as the next arrival.

She returned to the story of losing her flask in Doha, arriving at the lounge feeling deflated and a little defeated. What changed the moment was not a particularly impressive space. It was a member of staff who noticed she was not alright, sat her down, took her seriously, and did something about it. The flask was not recovered. But she left that interaction feeling calmer and less alone in her frustration.