Plaza Premium vs Oriental Club at Taoyuan (TPE): Which Lounge Should You Pick?

The five lounges at a glance

All five are airside, past security and passport control. You need a boarding pass for a flight departing that day — transit passengers count too.

You are not stuck in your terminal

This is the part most people get wrong, and it costs them the better lounge.

Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 at Taoyuan are joined inside the restricted area. Once you are through security you can move between them two ways:

• The south airside connector — a walkway of roughly 650–800 metres linking T1 Concourse B to T2 Concourse C, with moving walkways. Budget 6 to 15 minutes depending on your pace.
• The Skytrain (north line) — the airside line, about two minutes between terminals.

The one thing to get right: clear security at the terminal your own flight departs from. Boarding passes are scanned at the checkpoint, so trying to enter through the other terminal's security can get you turned away. Go through your own, then walk or ride across.

Opening hours and how long you can stay

Two lounges run around the clock: Oriental Club and Plaza Premium Zone D in Terminal 1. If you are on a red-eye or a dawn departure, those are your only real choices — the other three Plaza Premium lounges close in the evening, and Zone C in Terminal 1 shuts earliest at 21:00.

Oriental Club runs a reduced "late-night mode" between 23:00 and 05:00. It stays open, but hot food service ends at 22:30, so an overnight visit means a thinner spread than you would get in the afternoon.

On stay limits, the gap matters more than it looks:

• Oriental Club: 3 hours on a Priority Pass entry. Paying at the desk instead only buys you 2 hours, with extra hours at TWD 200 each.
• Plaza Premium: 2 hours as standard. Plaza Premium's own booking system also sells 5-hour and 10-hour blocks at higher prices.

That extra hour at Oriental Club is worth having if your flight is delayed, or if you deliberately arrive early to eat and work before boarding.

Showers, sleeping and other facilities

Three of the five have showers: Oriental Club, Plaza Premium Zone D (T1) and Plaza Premium Zone A (T2). At Oriental Club they are complimentary for guests; at Plaza Premium, shower access can carry a charge and is subject to availability depending on how you entered.

Oriental Club is the better-equipped of the two brands here. Alongside showers it lists a dedicated sleeping area, massage chairs and fitness equipment. Plaza Premium lounges offer comfortable seating, workstations with power, free Wi-Fi and, at some zones, small private rooms and meeting rooms.

If you want a shower, register at the desk the moment you walk in. There are only a handful of shower rooms and each guest gets around half an hour. Ask at the last minute and you will usually find the queue already full.

Food and drink

This is where opinion separates the two most clearly, and it generally favours Oriental Club.

Oriental Club serves a buffet alongside made-to-order hot dishes, and its beef noodle soup comes up again and again in visitor write-ups. Plaza Premium runs a buffet of hot and cold dishes drawing on Taiwanese and international cooking — soups, noodles, salads, light snacks — plus coffee, tea, soft drinks, beer and wine. Reviewers tend to describe it as perfectly adequate rather than memorable, with slower restocking at peak times.

Two caveats worth holding on to. Food quality swings with the hour and the crowd: the same lounge on a quiet weekday afternoon and on a holiday evening are different experiences. And hot food at Oriental Club stops at 22:30, so late-night visitors should not plan a meal around it.

What entry actually costs

Paying at the door is the most expensive way in. Plaza Premium lists walk-in access from TWD 1,500 (about US$48); Oriental Club charges TWD 1,300 (about US$41) for two hours, plus TWD 200 for each extra hour.

Booking ahead through a travel platform brings that down. At the time of writing, third-party sellers list Plaza Premium access at roughly US$36 to US$39 for three hours, and Oriental Club at around US$23.

We sell single-entry passes from US$20 per person. Same lounges, same entry at the desk — you show the pass and go in.

Children are handled differently by each lounge. Under-2s go free at both. Oriental Club gives a 30% discount for ages 2 to 11. Plaza Premium sets its own policy, and in practice children over 2 are usually charged as adults. Tell us the ages when you book and we will confirm with the lounge before issuing anything — that way you are not paying for a pass your child did not need.

So which one should you choose?

If you want the most for your money: Oriental Club. Three hours instead of two, free showers, a sleeping area, and the food most visitors rate higher. It is in Terminal 2, but as covered above, that does not rule it out if you depart from Terminal 1.

If you are flying late at night or very early: Oriental Club or Plaza Premium Zone D. They are the only two open 24 hours. Zone D is in Terminal 1; Oriental Club is in Terminal 2 but drops to reduced service after 23:00.

If you are going to work: Plaza Premium Zone D. Reviewers consistently praise its seating — including individual honeycomb-style pods with reading lights, power sockets and USB charging — over the alternatives.

If you need a shower: Oriental Club, Zone D or Zone A — and register at the desk on arrival, not later.

If you want quiet: avoid the evening departure peak and public holidays. Every pay-per-use lounge at Taoyuan gets loud when it fills up; this is not something one brand solves and the other doesn't. At Oriental Club specifically, visitors report the open area by the entrance is the noisiest part — walk further in and it settles down.

What we need to book for you

Four things:

1. Each traveller's name exactly as printed in their passport. The lounge desk checks the passport against the pass. A misspelling or a reversed given/family name can get you refused, and passes usually cannot be amended once issued.
2. Your travel date and, if you know it, roughly when you want to go in.
3. Which lounge, or just tell us your terminal and flight time and we will suggest one.
4. Ages of any children travelling with you.

One practical note for Oriental Club: install the Priority Pass app before you fly. Entry runs through it, and sorting it out at the desk with a queue behind you is not where you want to be.

Passes cannot be refunded once issued — that is the nature of the ticket, not our policy, and we cannot cancel them upstream. If you have not been issued one yet, tell us as early as you can and we will change the date or sort something out.

Frequently asked questions