During my first class quest to Japan , I had the chance to spend some time in the Philippine Airlines Mabuhay Lounge Manila Airport (MNL). I had a roughly four hour layover, as I had arrived in Philippine Airlines’ A330 business class from Osaka (KIX) , and was connecting to Philippine Airlines’ A350 business class to San Francisco (SFO).

On the plus side, I didn’t have to switch terminals this time around, because a terminal change in Manila makes for what’s possibly the world’s worst airport transit experience . However, that’s not to say that the layover was smooth — quite to the contrary, I found the entire ground experience to be pretty bad . Transit security was a mess, and the lounge was overcrowded, with some major shortcomings.

Some may think my review here is overly critical, but let me simply state that somehow the lounge Wi-Fi doesn’t work on “foreign” computers (based on my experience, and confirmed by an airline employee), and that’s just mind-boggling to me.…