llunow

Is January realistic at all? Is it official? I wish you are right.

Brgds
llunow

Pandion1Haliaetus

To be honest, I do not recognize what is being said about SAS in this thread. I have travelled extensively with a lot of airlines, primarily * Alliance, mainly in Business Class or Plus when travelling for work, but also in Economy when travelling on holiday and I find that the product in general is pretty similar to others and if there are differences, they are usually minor. The age of the planes is an issue of course and SAS have been too slow ín investing in new equipment, where others have been quicker - although you can still bump into old planes with other airlines!

The equipment part will hopefully be solved within next year, but I think that credit is due to the service provided by dedicated crew members - expectations of course vary and some may not be satidfied, but I must say that mostly I am quite happy with the service!

fassy

I do agree and I share the experience that the SAS crews are great most of the times.

Same goes for ground service and back office staff. To be honest I had quite a lot of issues with LH, LO and UA while I can't say a bad thing about SAS - besides the horrible IT

Anyway, the hard product is really dated, and the soft product is just average in C and below average in economy while the price is often not competitive.

aulrik

In general I agree with you, I too like SAS very much and when I'm in Scandinavia I only fry SK (not that you can compare a 60 min. flight with long haul), and the lounge in Oslo is one of my favorites (yea, I know it's not extensive like the TK lounge at IST, but it's fairly comfortable and got food that suit my taste). And yes; All airlines got good and bad sites. I now got most of my 300.000 miles a year on TK, and they are for sure not perfect either).

However, the reason I stopped using SAS for most of my travel is their "under par" C product. They have not invested in this for many years, and it kind of show their attitude when the CEO last year stated that "Our customers don't request lie flat seats" (http://www.dagbladet.no/2013/03/26/t...lass/26393051/) - Well, it might be the fact on the surveys they have made, but for me a C product without a decent seat is not interesting. On top comes the hit or miss on the long haul crew. Sometimes they are great, other times they are plain terrible, with a "god I hate passengers" attitude and a body language that clearly shows what they think of you.

FlyingMoose

Their main problem is everything is to old, wether it's planes, service model, crews, it's all the same. New planes are on the way, hopefully new crews as well and they are making good improvements to the product in the new long haul planes at least. I'm hoping to see improvements on the new Airbus A320Neo's as well.

I've had very positive experiences with the Blue1 crews which are all young and far more service minded. The SAS crews are just terrible, with new planes on the way that should really be their next focus area.

UltraRant

Well, the rant by OP actually sums up most longhaul experiences in Y on European and North American carriers, I believe. The only company in Europe (according to my opinion) that actually serves a decent product in Y on long haul is Swiss. LH and OS have gone down significantly since the last round of 'enhancements'.

Anyway, I do believe that the new long haul cabins will be a huge improvement compared to the current product. I've seen pictures in last month's in flight magazine and it really looks good. However, that does not take away two important other factors that make SK long haul an inferior experience: first the food and (lack of) drinks and the second is the attitude of the cabin crew. Most staff I've encountered so far have made grunting and shrugging into a delicate art form. By the tone and length of the shrug and grunt you should be able to determine the intended answer, which ranges from 'I don't know, I don't care' to 'quit bothering me with your stupid questions'. And it's so pointless. A smile costs nothing, general politeness is also free. If you don't like your job as flight attendant, then why don't you go and find something else to do?

If SAS could also put in some effort in fixing these two issues then I'd say they really have a more competitive product again. Right now the main reasons for me to book long haul with them are the sometimes fantastic offers (I'll even have some budget left to buy some food pre-boarding!), the amount of points I get, cheap possible option town upgrades for relatively cheap plus and business tickets on private flights, and that CPH is a generally good airport for connecting to and from long haul flights. Much better than LHR, CDG or FRA.

nacho

I doubt that SAS can fire all their horrible crew. Firing people in Scandinavia is not easy, and Scandinavian is not the most service-minded people in the world IMO. Also I think if the whole company culture is like that, no matter who they hire, they will behave like that too.

nacho

You don't count TK as an European airline

Nothing beats TK's Y in NA/Europe IMO - full meal service, plus their state-of-art 737-900 (tried once without the IFE) was impressive.

The crew are just hopeless - basically they don't want you to bother them and they just do their absolutel minimum. They don't even have the very basic human nature - give a helping hand to other people.

I was 33 weeks pregnant when I was flying from CPH-GVA, together with my husband and our at that time 13 months old. We had a stroller with us, and there was no walkway to the plane, so we had to walk stairs up. I was carrying the stroller up the stairs (no ground staff was there to take care of it and we were told that we had to lift it up), while my husband was carrying our 13 months old + diaper bag + part of the hand luggage. You know what - there was a crew standing at the end of the stairs, looked at us with her arms crossed! It was a female in her 30s.

Seriously?! Even as a normal person you might want to offer help when you see people like that (no one around us offered us help either - maybe it's because it was Denmark). To be honest, I don't need help but if I was the crew I would offer my help rather than look and wait.

After we are on the aircraft, we asked the crew if they could help us to seat together (asked at the gate and they said they can't do anything). They were very cold and told us to sort it out ourselves, how nice.

That's the same reason I fly SK - good offers.

UltraRant

The trick in Scandinavia is thus to not fire people but to make sure they feel the urge to change jobs as soon as possible.

UltraRant

I consider TK as much as European airline as Turkey considers itself a European state nowadays.

I may hope you refer to the SK crew? Otherwise you just got a very weird image of your quality standards in my head.

I'm not able to get pregnant (due to being male and all that), I don't have children, so I haven't ever really thought about such issues. Given the reaction of the SK flight attendant I guess she hasn't been pregnant either. Given the attitude of most FA's I even wonder if she knows what love is, the poor thing...

And yes, 2000 NOK/SEK/DKK (or 2500) for a return to EWR or PVG is quite an unbeatable price. In this case 'you get what you pay for', I think.

Pandion1Haliaetus

Again, from my countless flights on SK, I don't recognize the picture being painted! Usually, the crew are friendly, attentive and helpful - not in the Asian way, by overdoing it so it almost makes you feel uncomfortable, but in a subtle and proactive way. What good is a smile, when it sort of is saying the same as a shrug or grunt? I fully agree that it is not the sort of behaviour you want to see or expect from the crew, that should be trained in customer service, but my experience is that it is seldom that this is seen with SK and certainly not unique to them!

Would think it is slightly unfair to base your criticism on one not so good experience. I have flown many many times with my children on SK and other airlines and find that SK definitely win on that account: always friendly and serviceminded towards familys travelling with children and mostly will do their utmost to satisfy their needs! And not just in respect of infants, the same goes for older children and pre-teens!

There is always room for improvement and SK surely have some issues to address, but in my opinion criticism should be constructive ...

GUWonder

Sometimes there is no winning. I offer assistance and sometimes get scowled at for offering assistance or even offering my seat. And when clearly helping out in less direct yet obvious ways too, usually there is no thanks and often I get the kind of looks that make you think someone saw an "alien". You can bet that there's a huge cultural gap between the US and Scandinavia when it comes to being considerate toward the elderly and the mobility-challenged. And the gap is on both the giving and taking side.

Cabin crew not helping out passengers struggling with fully-loaded and overloaded hands is sort of increasingly normal for the North American and European OECD nations' carriers. SK crew do just the minimum of what is required of them by their employer and won't go much beyond that. The rest of the world is catching up with airline crew being as dispassionate about customer service. Fortunately the SK crew don't tend to be as paranoid as the US airline crews.

Bjornstrom

That's the official information we have got, the first A340 goes into refurbishment in December for January flights, but these things are prone to delays so who knows. I'll let you know when they confirm things.

UltraRant

I fully agree that some of those east-Asian airlines have staff that can be overdoing it so much that it makes one feel uncomfortable. I don't feel very comfortable with people who just say 'yes' and 'amen' to everything. But that's quite the opposite of SK staff in general. I also fully agree that criticism should be constructive, but so far I haven't seen anything that is just cursing to curse or lacks any ground. Do you perhaps mean that you only want to focus on the positive points? In that case I'd almost be tempted to ask if you work for the airline.

We might of course also have completely different views on what 'customer friendly', 'attentive', 'pro-active' or 'helpful' is. The situation described by nacho is something I, from my countless flights with SK, find very recognizable. If pro-active and helpful is the same as just standing there, watching a very pregnant woman struggling to get a lot of things on the stairs, then no, we have a different interpretation. A true professional could have at least asked if she needed any help. I've seen that happen with other airlines.

To be honest, if you are working in a job that requires a lot of direct interaction with the customers, if you form the 'face' of your company and if your performance may have direct consequences for how many people would return to your business, then the least you expect is a basic level of professional behavior. I honestly have to say that good manners are not something I encounter a lot in Scandinavians in general, a lot of them simply don't understand basic concepts of behaving properly when in company. I also encounter a lot of passengers who just grunt 'coffee!' or 'water!' to a FA when asked what to drink (where the question of 'What would you like to drink?' with SK is often shortened to 'yes?', 'grmbl?' or 'drink?'). What happened to saying 'please'? What happened to general politeness?
Even saying 'yes' or 'no' with a smile or at least in a polite way would be a significant improvement over just grunting, shrugging and walking away. Do you understand why it is different, even though it may mean the same? This is, again, not behavior one should expect from a professional. And this is something a lot of other airlines actually do properly in general, but not SK.

The same actually goes for chewing gum. A true professional would never ever stand chewing out loud in my ear. It's filthy, it's disgusting, it's barbaric, it's unprofessional and it demonstrates a complete lack of any form of manners. It makes one look like a cheap wh*re, basically. But SK actually has staff that thinks it's perfectly normal. Again, this is something that a lot of Scandinavians think is pretty normal (fortunately only a certain amount, I would have remigrated instantly if it concerned all of them), just like sticking the stuff on the middle of a seat when you're done with it. What happened to waiting until you found a garbage can or garbage bag? Now it's just there waiting to ruin someones outfit or haircut. Again, they just don't know it isn't normal to disturb others with your own lack of manners. Don't worry, I encounter a lot of weird behavior on my job as well, it's not only the SK employees (or their guests). There are lots of colleagues who think it's pretty normal to hold your knife and fork in a random hand and then in a way as if you're going to kill someone with your cutlery. And it's also pretty normal around here to speak with your mouth full of food, spraying the contents around, or to chew with a lot of sound and the mouth wide open, so that others can clearly see and hear what's going on. I think it's filthy and disgusting, though. There is something called 'etiquette', which is basically a simple set of basic rules that, if everyone follows them more or less, means we bother each other as little as necessary. Good stuff, thus, someone should try to introduce it in these parts of the world. Anyway, talking about food. I think it's 'not done' for a FA to reserve your favorite meal before serving to guests, knowing that some of your pax in economy may not get their choice because of that. Again, with SAS this seems to be common practice: employees first, guests are on second plan. Or how about saying 'sorry' if something goes wrong? When I sit in Plus on medium or long haul and asked for a simple soft drink several times, and then ask it again to a FA and instead of 'sorry, let me fix it' get a foul mouthed answer among the lines of 'can't you see I'm busy?' (happened to me on my way to BCN earlier this year), 'No, you should have reminded me earlier, now I just put it all away' (on the way to NCE earlier this year) or 'grmbl' (when flying back from IAD earlier this year), then I don't think that's nice behavior. Nor pro-active. Nor helpful. Let alone subtle. Especially when it means I still don't get the drink. Or when it comes to serving food in Plus. I don't think it's very nice, nor subtle, nor pro-active, nor professional that an FA makes a deep sigh, rolls her eyes and slowly takes the evening meal away after I politely refused it (really wanting something else instead, knowing what would be inside that cardboard box, as happened on a flight to AMS earlier this year). It's not professional to just slam a random muffin on my desk afterwards when I kindly asked for a chocolate one. I mean, I really must have bothered her with my existence in general and completely ruined her day by staying completely within the rules of Plus. Same goes for for example the lounges, where it seems to be common practice that guests have to make way if an employee needs to get somewhere. I've even been shooed from my chair in OSL*G when someone wanted to clean around there. With LH or LX, for example, most employees would politely wait an instance to let their guests finish their business first when they're for example taking something from the buffet. At least it's a good reason to send in yet another complaint to SAS if something like this happens.

Anyway, good for you that you only have positive experiences with the airline. I hope you have many more happy flights. Please respect that other have different experiences and thus different opinions. Maybe you should try LH (ok, to a certain extent), LX or TK once, just for a change and see if you like it?

Alright, rant over.

Pandion1Haliaetus

I did certainly not mean that we only should focus on the positive points, my point was simply to say that in my opinion there is not much difference between the various carriers! And I have flown a lot with other carriers as well - again, not much difference! Concerning TK in particular, I do not like very much - I fly between IST and CPH on a regular basis in C and it is nothing to rave about, other than the price, which usually is pretty good. Usually service bordering to rude and the food is not that great either.

And to put you at ease, I am not working for SK - although with the number of miles flown on their metal over the last few years, it almost feels like it. I do have negative things to say about them, but not more or less than any other.

Let us just agree that we may have had different experiences - unlucky for you and lucky for me it seems

I hope your future travels with SK will improve!