As part of our South African Safari trip, we spent one night in Johannesburg before flying to Skukuza Airport in the Kruger National Park. We had arrived in Johannesburg the day before, flying Qatar Airways business class from New York to Doha, and then Doha to Johannesburg. We’d be flying Airlink to Skukuza, departing from Johannesburg OR Tambo Intl Airport. But before that, we were able to spend some time in the Priority Pass lounges at the airport: The Bidvest Premier Lounge, and on a layover later on in the trip, at the Bidvest Sky Lounge (sometimes referred to as the ORT Skylounge).

Here I’ll review the Bidvest Sky Lounge in Terminal B, situated in the domestic terminal. Though we visited this lounge when we flew from Mpumalanga Airport MPX via Johannesburg JNB to Port Elizabeth PLZ, to start the Garden Route section of our trip, I’ll review this lounge now, to ‘close out’ the Johannesburg OR Tambo lounges we visited.

Briefly, this lounge has a nice selection of food, but is quite small. The seating is rather packed together and so it tends to feel rather busy. We much preferred the Bidvest Premier Lounge (review here), which is just one level down of the main concourse. It is bigger, more spacious, with a more modern aesthetic and a larger food selection.

Hours and location

The Bidvest Sky Lounge can be found right above the main security checkpoint at OR Tambo’s Terminal B. The single security checkpoint is on the far end of the check-in hall, and if you look up on the right side of the checkpoint, you’ll see some windows with ‘Bidvest Sky Lounge’ written.

To actually get there you’d take an immediate right after getting through security, following the overhead signs. These will bring you to an elevator, with another sign right by it to indicate which lounges can be reached through it. Take the elevator to the top floor, take an immediate left, and the entrance to the Bidvest Sky Lounge will be right there.

Note that for the Bidvest Premier Lounge, which I reviewed before, you do not follow the signs and instead go straight ahead, up the ramp, and then follow the signs to the E-gates, down an escalator.

Through the doors we entered into the lobby area with the reception desk, which was staffed by two friendly attendants. They quickly swiped us in using my husband’s Priority Pass membership, courtesy of the Citibank Strata Elite credit card.

Access Requirements

The Bidvest Lounge network has many locations across Southern Africa (besides only South Africa), and all have similar access requirements:

• The Bidvest Premier Lounge is used as a contract lounge for premium passengers of many airlines flying in and out of OR Tambo’s domestic terminal, including Airlink, FlySafair and CemAir
• There are many lounge memberships that will grant access into the lounge, typically 2 hours in advance of your flight’s departure time. This include Priority Pass (which is what we uses, courtesy of my husband’s Citibank Strata Elite credit card), Lounge Club, Lounge Key and Dragon Pass, plus a host of local South African cards issues by Amex, Diner’s Club and various regional and local banks. Full list of partners are on Bidvest’s website.
• You can buy a pass, either in advance or as a walk-in. The rates are around 300ZAR (~$19) for a 2-hour walk-in pass, or 40 ZAR per 15 minutes for early check-in.

Seating and Design

As you turn right at the reception desk, you’ll be in the lounge. Overall, this lounge is small, and it’s essentially a big rectangle. In the middle is the buffet, with seating to all sides of it (except in front, where the reception is). Then there’s windows spanning the entire back and right walls of the lounge.

Immediately in front is the buffet, and the fist set of seating, consisting of lounge chairs setup primarily in quads. Glass panes with some decoration separates the quads in the length, but there’s otherwise no partition between the quads to the aisles on each side.

The buffet is fairly large for a lounge of this size, with their being a central drink station and sections on either side with the food. More on that later.

By the buffet is also a small counter with a sanitizing station, though there’s otherwise nothing here. It looks as though there may have been something here previously. Otherwise, the seats in this section are comfortable and well-maintained. I didn’t spot any obvious outlets, however.

To the right of the series of quads, there’s a bar with high-top seating, with a view of the security checkpoint. These seats are not super comfortable to sit on for an extended amount of time given the short backrest. However, there’s ample outlets here and the bar makes it easy to place a laptop and do some work. The view over the checkpoint is also kind of cool.

As mentioned, the windows continue along the entire right wall, and also at the back, and so does the bar with high-top seating, as you can see below. There’s some cafe-style seating here with round tables. The view from the back windows is more or less that of the check-in desks.

Looking back into the lounge from the back windows, there’s another section with seating, as well as more drinks stations. The one on the right had primarily wines, while the one on the left had soft drinks, beers and liquor. The seating here consisted of more of the round tables and larger lounge chairs, though the setup was a little disorganized and, frankly, rather cramped with not much space between chairs.

Overall, this lounge is very small, and simple in setup. There’s not a ton of seating and much of it was occupied when we got here. The aesthetics are okay. At least everything seemed quite well-maintained, even if it’s not the prettiest lounge.

Food and Drinks

As mentioned, there is a single island that holds all the food, and there are a number of drink stations.

At the front (closer to the reception) you will find all the hot options. These consisted (at our lunchtime visit) of various meat and vegetable dishes, and rice and potatoes as sides. On the other side were some breads, biscuits, crackers and cookies.

Then in the center part of the island are hot drink machines, as well as accompaniments, including tea bags, sugar and sweetener.

The back end of the buffet had a large variety of salads, fruits, vegetables and desserts. The spread looked beautiful, with all the various colors, making for a very appealing selection of foods.

Coming back around now, the other side of the middle section had another hot drink machine as well as slushy dispensers (I think). These are very popular in South Africa, as we saw these sorts of things in many places across the country.

There’s two more drink stations in the lounge. One of these has a variety of soft drinks, including various sodas, but also a good selection of liquors and a fridge with a variety of beers. many of these turned out to be international brands, but there were also local options.

There was a separate station devoted to wines, with all the various types and brans prominently displayed. It was nice to see many of these were South African wines – I like to see lounge promote their local/regional products. I also have to admit that I liked a lot of the south African wines I got to taste, so this may be an opportunity to try some wines.

Note there were further fridges with beers and soft drinks here as well, though the selection over at the other drink station was a little more comprehensive.

Overall, the food and drink selection at this lounge is surprisingly good, given how small and how little seating there otherwise is. At least you can have some proper drinks and food. given the commonality of the food selections, I’m quite sure this lounge and the Bidvest Premier Lounge share dishes.

Restrooms and Showers

There did not seem to be showers at this lounge.

In terms of restrooms, these are shared between men and women. There’s a single corridor that brings you there, first passing an extra large restroom for people with disabilities.

Then the corridor winds and opens up into a common area with a series of sinks to the left, and five stalls on the right. These are what you would expect. they are a little narrow and have all the necessities, but nothing extra. The design of the sinks is functional, and I found everything to be clean and in good working order.

The restrooms in this lounge absolutely do the trick, as they are clean, generally well-maintained and functionally designed. Don’t expect any awards for design, though.

Summary

Overall, the Bidvest Sky Lounge is probably a little better than the average Priority pass Lounge, given that the food selection really is very nice. I also appreciated the wide variety of drinks. However, it is a small lounge with not a lot of seating. Some of the seating is also packed a little tightly. It’s kind of fun to sit along the windows and look at the activity at the security checkpoint or check-in desks, though. However, if you have a choice, I’d suggest to head to the Bidvest Premier Lounge, located a few floors down by the E-gates, assuming you don’t also have access to the South African Lounge (which I did not, so I didn’t review it).