Ho John Lee’s Weblog

I usually fly to Asia on United, since San Francisco is their primary US Pacific hub. Tokyo is the main Asian hub for United, so the Narita Red Carpet Club is sort of a crossroads for business travellers from Silicon Valley.

On any given journey there’s a decent chance of bumping into someone I know along the way. In addition to professional colleagues and acquaintances, once I also ran into one of the other parents from my daughter’s elementary school class.

The lounge is huge, and provides tables, lounging chairs, work surfaces for notebooks, and assorted views of the airport activities. There is a famous automatic beer pouring machine, which fills the chilled glasses without overflowing. There are also assorted drinks including wine, distilled spirits, soft drinks, and water. There’s not much in the way of food there, so you’ll need to bring your own. They normally stock apples and sometimes oranges and bananas, along with crackers and cheese, Japanese seaweed cracker mix, and cookie snack packages (which usually run out).

The lounge can be a nice place to sit and read or do some work. The AC outlets there are all US-style, 120 volts, there are RJ-11 phone jacks if you need to use a dial-up line or use a calling card, and there are several access points providing free wireless service. The network sits behind a NAT and has most outgoing ports blocked, so you may have problems connecting to a VPN, unless it’s set up on port 80 or 443. As with any public wireless venue, you should be sure to secure your system properly, and assume all traffic is being captured.

It’s always surprising to me how many business travellers don’t have their wireless notebook computers secured at all. Even without scanning for open systems, I commonly see Windows computers announcing their file shares, some of which accessible, along with lots of iTunes collections open for sharing as soon as I connect to the wireless network. I also see port scans and more unfriendly traffic from time to time there, so it’s really worth getting properly patched before you travel.

If you can’t get in to the United Red Carpet club, in a pinch, you can actually pick up the wireless from the hallway outside, although there aren’t really good places to sit. There’s a paid wireless access service down the concourse as well. Connecting international Business Class ticket holders on United automatically get access, along with paid Red Carpet Club members and various Star Alliance lounge members.

A key, but little known feature of the Narita Red Carpet Club is that they have a set of showers for use by transit passengers. There are 10-12 shower rooms, behind a desk toward the back of the lounge. You trade your boarding card for a basket of toiletries containing everything you need to get cleaned up. The shower rooms are compact but nice, and include a little intercom panel on the wall which they will use to page you if your flight is getting ready to board. (I have used this feature more than once.)

Taking a hot shower and changing your clothes can make you feel much more civilized on a long trip, such as San Francisco to Bangalore.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 3rd, 2005 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Travel, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.