My three days in Taipei had come to an end, and it was finally time to begin the journey back to the UK, starting with a short hop from Taipei to Hong Kong. Dragging a massive suitcase onto the metro from Taipei Songshan Airport earlier in the trip had already exhausted me, so this time I made sure to learn my lesson. I simply booked an airport transfer on Trip.com for under £20, which felt like excellent value.
EVA Air’s home base is Terminal 2 at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, and the entire process — check-in, security, and immigration — was impressively fast and smooth.
EVA Air actually operates four lounges in T2. The two aimed at mainstream passengers are:
- The Infinity: for EVA Air and Star Alliance business/first class passengers
- The Star: for EVA Air and Star Alliance Gold members
According to the signage outside, the lounges also cooperate with non-alliance airlines such as Hainan Airlines and XiamenAir. In practice, though, the two lounges are fully interconnected anyway: turn right at reception for Infinity, turn left for Star. Premium cabin passengers can clearly access both, but status passengers are only allowed in the Star.
Let’s start with The Infinity. Passing through a narrow corridor, there’s a small workspace area on the side.
The seating throughout follows a fairly uniform design language.
Then into the dining area.
The main hot dishes on offer that day included:
- White asparagus cream soup
- Asparagus and mixed vegetables
- Chicken thigh blanquette with mushrooms and baby onions
- Sauteed macaroni with beef in garlic cream saurce
- Str fried noodles
- Chinese noodles
- Braised pork
- Gua bao
- Clear stewed beef soup
- Oden
There’s no à la carte dining, but the selection was still quite extensive and looked genuinely appetising. That said, I had far too many lounges to visit in both Taipei and Hong Kong today, so I tried to show some restraint and only tasted the noodles and pork belly.
Self-served Häagen-Dazs ice cream was available as well.
Afterwards I wandered next door to check out The Star. This side has a luggage storage room.
The décor here is completely different from Infinity’s public area and feels noticeably more modern and refined. Personally, I preferred The Star’s atmosphere quite a bit more.
There are also private single-person cubicles.
The dining area looks like this.
As for the food, it was almost identical to Infinity’s selection. The only difference I noticed was that the beef noodle soup had been replaced with a clam and chicken noodle soup. Overall, aside from the interior design style, the facilities, catering, and crowd levels were essentially the same between the two lounges.
Walking back outside, directly opposite sits the most exclusive lounge of them all: The Garden, accessible only to EVA Air’s own Diamond-tier members. Sadly, I had no chance of getting in there.
There’s also another lounge called The Club, apparently intended for EVA Air Silver members, so presumably a more stripped-down version.
My quick lounge-hopping session wrapped up there, as I still needed to do a bit of duty-free shopping before boarding.
Honestly speaking, these two EVA Air lounges felt somewhat underwhelming. The food quality was comfortably above average, but the hardware itself felt rather ordinary, and the overall design lacked much aesthetic flair. That’s not to say they were bad lounges by any means — it’s just that EVA Air’s reputation is so strong that expectations naturally end up being higher across the board.
Compared to the lounges, though, the airline’s onboard hard product is significantly more impressive. Before that, however, we still have a visit to Singapore Airlines’ lounge coming up next.
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