Cathay’s Vivian Lo talks design language of new Aria business suiteRunway Girl

There are few things as anticipated in the passenger experience world this year as Cathay Pacific’s forthcoming Aria business class product. The airline has been on a #PaxEx spree recently, with new restaurant partnerships, evolved lounge design aesthetics and soft product changes, ready for Aria. Runway Girl Network travelled (as, full disclosure, a guest of the airline) to Hong Kong for a wide-ranging discussion with Vivian Lo, general manager for customer experience and design, over tea in the airline’s The Pier first class lounge.

“One of the things that we’ve worked very hard on — and we want to make it one of our differentiating attributes — is our focus on design, the Cathay design,” Lo explains to RGN. “I invited you here [to the Pier] because I think this is one of the best displays of how we really built up our own design ethos and design language. There’s a lot of thoughts behind what we would describe as understated luxury. There’s a lot of kind of comfort in it, but then it actually is very differentiating.”

Vivian Lo. Image: Cathay Pacific

It’s striking just how differentiated the Cathay brand is: consider for example the four oneworld airline lounges at London Heathrow’s Terminal 3, where most of the alliance’s members are clustered, and how the Cathay lounge stands out from the crowd.

“I think, by now, most people when they see just a snapshot of the Cathay lounges, they would already start to know them — even just from the lighting, or just the warmth it creates,” Lo says. “Increasingly, both in-flight, as well as on the ground, we’ll be differentiating ourselves through our design approach, and that requires us to really rethink about what is important: what are the Cathay ethos? Cathay design language? Cathay palette? You can see that it has a lot more warmth than before. How we use green is also a little bit different from before.”

The Pier first class lounge for Cathay Pacific is clean and crisp with white and light wood tones. Lots of greenery. Vivian Lo, general manager for customer experience and design

Cathay Pacific’s The Pier first class lounge. Image: John Walton

Indeed, in their post-shutdown refresh, even the meticulously designed Pier lounges have seen softening additions to the design language, especially around large tropical plants and an emphasis on warmer wood elements in a space that can seem focussed on harder decorative stone surfaces..

When it comes to the new business class suite, Lo continues, “you saw the glimpse of the Aria suite in the teaser video: it also looks a bit different from how we designed the previous seats. There’s a lot more kind of affinity between the design language between inflight cabins and the lounge.”

That said, she notes, “they are not identical, because the usage will be different — it’s actually more retro here in the lounges with very different lighting because this is really for relaxation. But onboard, you have different modes of being either a couch potato, relaxing, using that as a theatre, as well as working or resting. The design is actually tailored a little bit based on that expected usage.”

That tailoring goes all the way down to the soft product, with Lo recounting stories of testing huge numbers of pillows and duvets in sleep tests to find the ones that will be loved by the greatest number of passengers.

When it comes to the new hard product, meanwhile, “we’ve been quite careful overall: for companies that actually believe in experience and design, it is quite important,” Lo says, including the veil of secrecy around the project in that importance. “We’ve been working on this project, the Aria Suite launching next year, since 2017. Until we launched the teaser video, no one knew we were working even on a retrofit programme: it’s almost unheard of in the airline industry.”

In the context of the timing that Cathay finds itself — with the delays to the 777X, yet despite the continuing strength of much of its 2010 business class Cirrus product — that retrofit was perhaps inevitable.

For the new suite, though, “we start with a design ethos, a design language, and a deep understanding of how our customers use the seat. It’s a multipurpose kind of space, unlike the lounge: you can see that you can have a very specific design of each piece of furniture, because people move around, depending on what they try to do. In the cabin, the seat moves around you: the experience evolves,” Lo says.

“So we think a lot about how our customers use the seat — sleeping experience, theatrical experience, how they work. We try to design the most premium design and curated experience to support that. As part of our design ethos of understated luxury, it’s very thoughtful. That in itself will put us in the right space,” she concludes. “Whether it’s on the business class seat or the first class suite, it is very Cathay-specific.”