Bus and Subway to airport
Though it's only a 10 minute walk from the hotel Fox to the closest Metro Norreport, we found a bus stop right next to the hotel and took advantage of the Copenhagen Card and boarded the bus 5A to the Metro bright and early in the morning. The Metro was quite packed as it seems lots of people had early flights to catch.
Metro to airport
Check-in and Bump
Soon we arrived at the airport and checked in for our 8 o'clock flight to Helsinki. Then something unexpected occurred. The agent asked if we would be interested in taking a flight an hour and a half later, and got 300 Euros as compensation. We never thought we would have a bump opportunity in this trip after we missed out on the San Francisco to Chicago leg. We told the agent sure, and she was estatic and wrote VDB on our boarding passes, and put a volunteer tag on our luggage. We were quite surprised at her excitement, we thought normally only gate agents would be happy to solicit for the volunteers in the rush to get the flight take off on time, nonetheless, we had not planned a lot of activities in Helsinki (not another bike tour ! ) and wouldn't mind to get there a little later.
Copenhagen Airport
VDB
SAS Lounge in Copenhagen
Then we went through security, and headed to the SAS lounge. We did not have high expectation after the seeing the Stockholm SAS lounge just the previous day, but the Copenhagen lounge was actually not bad. While there's still not any hot food served, the selection of bread, fruits and cold cut meat was quite decent. The lounge was also very spacious, and had several computer terminals, and wifi is also free.
Copenhagen SAS lounge
SAS Lounge
Plenty of Macs
Breakfast
Bread
Our breakfast
Flight
We then headed to the gate, and saw our Blue1 flight, an Avro RJ85 aircraft, pulling in. The gate area was quite crowded, it's a good bet our seats would be needed. Sure enough, just before they started boarding, our names were called and we were told to wait for our vouchers and new boarding passes for the next flight.
KF 638 Copenhagen (ARN) 8:10am Helsinki (HEL) 10:45am
Aircraft: Avro RJ85 Avroliner
Distance: 558 miles
Duration : 1 hour 35 min
Class: Economy Extra
Blue1
Crowded gate
Since we would have another hour and a half to kill, we went back to the SAS lounge. This time we found the treasure, cup noodles ! Finally some hot food for breakfast !
Hot Noodles
So we each got 150 Euro if we are to use it as a voucher, or we could just cash out at half the amount, i.e. 75 Euros each. We still quite have not figured out what to do with the voucher yet, since SAS does not fly to San Francisco, we need to have a trip to a SAS city first to use the voucher to buy a ticket. So maybe we will take the cash option. For this amount of money, we gave up our Economy extra seats on the original flight, and got the absolute worst seat on the new flight. Our flight is on an MD80, but not only did we not get the Economy extra seat and therefore no breakfast on board, we were stuck in the last row, with zero recline and close to the toilet ! Also, we would need to pay for our own drinks, that is, even for sodas ! OK, it's only a short flight, so we can tolerate that, and will probably do that again for another 150 Euro voucher/75 Euro cash. And after we landed, we had to wait for our luggage anyways, so we did not really lose any time by exiting the plane last.
SK 1712 Copenhagen (ARN) 9:35am Helsinki (HEL) 12:10pm
Aircraft: MD80
Distance: 558 miles
Duration : 1 hour 35 min
Class: Economy
View from back of plane
Helsinki baggage claim