Originally Posted by
OFFlyer
I lack the words....
Shanghai is the fastest growing business centre in the world. It is a booming market, in business in political sense and from a tourist perspective. To meet this demand SAS opens up ARN-PEK, increases capacity on the highly competitve transatlantic routes - and closes CPH-PVG.
I do not think I can find a nice wording around this - this is just one of the dumbest moves in recent times. Either Frösundavik have been smoking something or SAS is not able to run a PVG route with profit. If the later is the case - then SAS does not have a justification in the market. Sell it to LH for 1 Swedish Peso
Way to go Lasse - it certainly does not talk in favour of Mats either.
I have no problems with understanding this move. SAS has not been able to make decent money off this route. First of all, the pilots have a 3 day rest in PVG compared to PEK where they only stay overnight. The reason is a BAD old contract with the unions making PVG a more expensive route to operate, an extra cost none of the other airlines have to deal with.
BTW, OS also cancelled PVG recently. There must be a reason for this??
Second, the PEK route has always made money, why would it be a bad strategy to increase frequencies there? PEK does not fill up with tourists, SAS sells plenty of C seats on the route.
SAS is just trying to get the most money out of the few planes that they have. I'm sure they will look east again when the new fleet is put in to service in a few years and they have more planes. No one likes the situation right now, the SAS intercont network is changing more than once a year... Not good
SK901/902 was really popular with plenty of business passengers. The route made you able to work all day in Scandinavia, fly to NYC in the evening, get to Manhattan before 9PM, go to bed and wake up rested for your meetings/job in NYC not loosing any work time on the plane. I'm really glad it's back! Also, the prices to the US in the summer are not low at all! For an 8/7 hour flight, SAS gets at least 1000 USD a head during the peak summer season in the back with full planes, almost 2000 more a head compared to the winter time.
And when it comes to Finnair, they actually lost money last year, so to use them as an airline model of success is just wrong.