RTW Roundup: Best airline shower suites
The Best: United Airlines Red Carpet Club, Sao Paulo
This is by far the best in-lounge shower experience. Your own room with toilet, sink, and shower, and cleaned after every use. The icing on top is the awesome H20 amenity kit you get, complete with Colgate toothpaste and H20 shampoo, shower gel, moisturizer, face wash, face moisturizer, and the tiniest deodorant stick I've ever seen (the cylinder on the right). I ended up using these amenities throughout my trip. Too bad the shower suite is only available for incoming paid first or business class passengers.
The Rest
Air New Zealand Koru Club showers are really pretty, and also have the complete toilet, sink, and shower combination. Plus, they seemed to be in every international terminal lounge I'd been in (AKL, MEL, CHC, SYD), and open to every lounge guest. The two big downsides were: 1) not cleaned after each use, resulting in water all over the place and dirty tissues lying around the toilet, and 2) meager amenities, with just unbranded shampoo, conditioner, and body wash coming out of a wall dispenser, but no moisturizers.
Singapore Airlines SilverKris showers in its home base of Singapore had an attendant that cleaned after every customer. Unfortunately, the showers must have been leaky because there was still water around the floor, no toilet, and worst of all, the moisturizer and other amenities were common use, and lacking in caps or pumps. This meant that there were squiggly hairs inside of my moisturizer bottle. I checked around and it seemed like every bottle in the men's room was like this. I wonder why.
Turkish Airlines CIP Lounge in Istanbul required you to ask at reception for towels and slippers. But some customers just went ahead and used the facilities without these, if they were just washing their feet (according to Muslim tradition). The set up is odd because it's pretty much just two showers, and a common changing area with several lockers. What it lacked in privacy, it more than made up for in atmosphere: this was definitely the most atmospheric shower room I'd been in, with antique-looking fixtures and floor to ceiling marble.
