Sydney’s Qantas domestic lounge gets a business-class upgrade.

The Qantas Business Lounge at Sydney’s domestic airport is the first to receive a refresh to more closely align the lounge to its international counterparts.

Part of the overhaul includes extending the lounge itself: over 100 seats and some 30 additional tables boosts the lounge’s capacity by over a third.

This lounge ‘land grab’ comes at the expense of the adjacent Qantas Club, which loses a slab of space previously given over to seating and workstations.

More than ever, it’ll be standing room only during peak times in what many frequent flyers refer to as the Qantas Pub.

The Qantas Business Lounge can be pretty summed up in one word. Seats. And there are plenty of them. This latest expansion adds over 100 seats to send capacity north of 350.

Much of the newly extended area sports a very comfortable bespoke loungechair from Sydney designer David Caon, part of Qantas’ domestic business lounge refit.

(And while we’re in design-mode, the arty lighting over the island dining and other areas comes from the Dutch collective studio Moooi, specifically being the ‘Random Light’.)

At least three other styles of chair are scattered around the lounge, to suit varying purposes such as working or eating. However, this mix and the fact that each type of chair seems to have been ordered in at least two colours makes the lounge seem like someone did a few good deals at an auction of ‘as new’ office furniture.

The Business Lounge sits next to the Qantas Club (location) opposite Gate 5 in Sydney Airport’s Domestic Terminal 3 – once you’re through the security check, take a hard left.

Entry is available to any Qantas passenger flying business-class on a domestic route or connecting to an international first- or business-class flight, as well as Qantas Platinum members and flyers with OneWorld Emerald status.

Centrepiece of the lounge upgrade is a new menu designed by the ponytailed and many-hatted Neil Perry, who serves as the airline’s consulting chef.

Customers can expect hot meals three times a day. On the morning we visited, the breakfast spread included scrambled – sorry, ‘folded’ – eggs, roast mushrooms with rosemary butter, baked beans and wilted English spinach.

Other breakfast options include fruit salad,  fresh strawberries, Greek salad and glasses filled with either Bircher muesli (with apple, spiced nuts and honey) or creamed sago pearls with mango and coconut.

Seasonal fruits include nashi pears, nectarines and apples. Breads and pastries come from Sydney boutique bakery Bowan Island.

That’s not a bad spread for breakfast! Later in the day there’s a flavoursome soup such as tomato and basil,  alongside a braised lunch dish – expect to see beef, pork or chicken, often in an Asian style – plus salads, dips, selected deli meats, cheeses and sweet treats.

Dinners are along the same lines and can include roast vegetables, along with open-faced sandwiches and terrines.

Best of all, the majority of these dishes are now prepared or finished off in the lounge’s kitchen rather than being brought in complete and ready to serve.

This includes the salads being delivered as separate ingredients and then combined and dressed, and the sandwiches being made on request.

Staff also do a ‘tray around’ of selected items in the morning and evening to avoid congestion at the servery. And for bonus points, plastic knives are out and metal knives are back!

New to the Business Lounge is ‘island dining’ on a tall 20-seat table. Alas, those seats aren’t quite the right height – they need at least another few inches. At the moment you sit almost at chest-level with your food, making you feel like kid at the grown-up’s table. Australian Business Traveller is told these chairs are temporary and ones of the correct height are on the way. [Update: the new chairs arrived a week after our review and diners can now perch at perfect height]

If there’s one area for improvement, though, it’s that the barista service is limited to weekday mornings from 5am to 11am.

That’s sure to be a disappointment to anyone travelling on weekends or who appreciates a serious belt of the bean at the end of a long working day. We’d love to see Qantas roster on a barista for at least the afternoon and early evening, even if weekends remain a pour-your-own zone.

Telstra provides free wireless Internet but there’s always the risk that this could get a bit overloaded during peak hours, so you may want to pack a mobile broadband modem to be sure of high speeds.

Under a deal cut with Apple all domestic Qantas lounges have ditched their Windows PCs and now have only iMacs – 16 of them in the Sydney business lounge.

Fortunately these can run either Mac OS X or Windows 7 Professional, with a helpful startup menu to let users choose their OS. There are also two print-copy-fax stations.

To freshen up after a long day there are four showers – one of which is for disabled access and also doubles as a baby change room.

One thing missing is a dedicated ‘quiet zone’. There’s no corner of the lounge where you can’t hear the blaring of a flat-screen TV tuned to Sky News, nor signage to discourage use of mobile phones for passengers who wish to carve a little bit of peace out of the hubbub.