Setting up retail stores or restaurants in unusual places is a neat way to differentiate: even if the product isn’t special, the novelty of browsing, buying or dining in an unconventional space has appeal.
Themed experiential restaurants typically don’t need unconventional buildings; instead they use creative design inside and outside conventional ones: Rainforest Café, Amazon Café, Cheesecake Factory, Cabbages and Condoms and hundreds of other concepts. For those who prefer a different kind of building shell, though, disused transport is an old favourite: everything from shipping containers to retired train carriages is part of the pantheon of retail formats. Abandoned aircraft not so much, though. Too big, too difficult to move, too expensive to buy and refurbish.
Except in Thailand.
On Route 331 in Chonburi Province, about 140 kilometres south of Bangkok, is an astonishing sight, particularly if you don’t know it’s there and just come upon it by accident while driving down the highway.
Despite its conspicuousness, you can still easily drive right past it because it is up above the road on a rise with a panoramic view over green fields east and south toward the Gulf of Thailand 20 kilometres away.
It is the strange sight of three parked, disused wide-bodied airliners – an A330 Airbus and a Boeing 747 that used to belong to Thai Airways, and a former Angel Air Cambodia Lockheed L-1011. There is also a former Thai Airways 737 sitting there. The interior of the A330 has been reconfigured as a luxurious café, including first class.
The four bigger planes are flanked by smaller antique aircraft, helicopters, military jeeps, and shops selling a remarkable collection of surplus military apparel and war memorabilia. This is Coffee War Station 331, set up by a retired Thai military officer. The Airbus that houses the restaurant reportedly cost about 10 million Thai baht (about US$285,000), which doesn’t sound so much when you start comparing it to a lot of coffee chain franchises.
The interior of the Coffee War A330 offers customers the kind of comfort passengers could only dream of when they were flying in the same aircraft before it was decommissioned. The air is cooled to a pleasant temperature, there is abundant legroom, comfortable seating with a table on which to sit the café order, no rude flight attendants to deal with, and no one telling customers to stay seated with their seatbelts fastened because there’s turbulence ahead.
The first-class compartment is unique in that there is no cost to sit there, and the flight deck is fully preserved with all its instrument panels intact so that kids (both big and little) can pretend they are at the controls.
Before going up the stairs to the plane, the customer has to buy a ticket for 100 baht ($3), which also entitles them to a drink. After lounging around in the plane and visiting the flight deck to imagine what it is like to fly a passenger jet, the visitor can go down to ground level and shop the amazing inventory on display in the adjacent shops: clothing, bags, accessories and an incredible array of antiques from the field of battle: manual typewriters, weaponry, cookware, mobile furniture and other war camping merchandise, all of it for sale. Many of the items bear no price tag and a price has to be negotiated with the store owner. Discounts are generous for multiple purchases.
Thailand’s special talent
Thailand seems to have a penchant for restoring airliners and incorporating them into retail operations that extend their usefulness into retirement, if not their flying lives. Not very far away from Coffee War Station 331, on the main road of the resort city of Pattaya, is another 747-B parked at the Runway 88 Street Food Market.
The plane has a long active history. It was first flown by Canada’s Canadian Pacific Air Lines in 1974, then Pakistan International Airlines. It eventually landed up at Pattaya’s U-Tapao Airport for decommissioning; it was pulled to pieces in 2014, and then moved to Pattaya itself, where it was jettisoned on a vacant block.
The plane was reassembled but sat there looking homeless through Covid-19 until the street food shops brought the block to life in 2022. Unlike the A330 at Coffee War 40 kilometres away, the Runway 88 aircraft is not itself in service as a restaurant, but rather provides a backdrop, a unique item of furniture.
And that isn’t all. Just down the street is the massive, airport-themed, Terminal 21 shopping mall, a favourite among tourists, which features a retired Continental Airlines 737 mounted on a pedestal in front of the building.
Jumbos in the capital
In Bangkok, retired 747s are the rage. At Lat Krabang, an eastern suburb of the capital, is the 747 Café, which is a former United Airlines 747 converted into a two-level bistro along with experiential elements that include, like Coffee War, an intact flight deck that customers can use for role-playing as pilots.
Other examples of disused but lovingly restored planes dot the country, and there is something surreal about the sight of huge aircraft somewhere that isn’t in an airport or in the sky itself. Yet as restaurants, they work superbly. There is a lot of space for the central behind-the-counter area when rows of seats are removed in the centre of the plane and overhead compartments are used for storage. With reconfigured seating there is also plenty of room for customers to luxuriate while imagining how cramped it once was when the same plane was at full capacity in its flying days.
So if you are a shopping mall developer or an adventurous retailer and have a little bit of open space to fill, think about this: the largest commercial airliner ever built, the double-decker A380, is now steadily entering its end-of-life phase. There were only about 250 of them produced, and some have already been scrapped. What a fine shopping mall one would make.
The post Flight of fancy: Retired Airbus houses Thailand’s Coffee War Station appeared first on Inside Retail Asia.
