UltraRant

Swedish is already a formal language in Finland.
Most road sings are bilingual, for example.

Anyway, it would make SAS an even more interesting airline than it is nowadays. Today i see SAS a bit as a chef with 2 hands an 6 heads (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Management, Shareholders and Unions all being one head), which is asked to make a three course dinner (one for each hub), where the heads first should have to agree on what the hands do (which they hardly do). The result is a hardly edible dish. Making it a 7 headed chef asked to make a 4 course dinner would make life more interesting, though.

Again, it may work, but it requires strong leadership: one of the heads must clearly take or be granted the lead.

oliver2002

Suuure... like in Belgium...

UltraRant

Belgium has just one road sign: 'Route degrade'.

GUWonder

The proportion of Finns who are conversationally very fluent in Swedish is higher than the native French-speaking Belgian Walloons are when it comes to speaking Flemish/Dutch.

That said, I see AY eating SK before SK eats AY, if either is to happen.

nacho

I think SK is too big to be "eaten" by anyone - who wants to take over the bad and/or expensive crew?

CPH-Flyer

After the last rounds of tightening the screws on the flight crews, I doubt that they are more expensive than say AY or LH. Of course compared to FR they are still expensive, but that is probably not the benchmark to use.

FlyingMoose

Never said appease 4 hubs. Wouldn't mind a few of the 19 or so A350's they ordered at ARN with additional routes to Asia. I'm sure the "short-cut" definition could be stretched.

oliver2002

Eating is easy, digesting rather tough. LH or IAG will only touch it after it goes thru bankruptcy and sheds its rather nasty 'assets' but since the current oil price and other factors keep 'zombie' airlines like LOT and SAS alive, we will not see any such eating attempts.

Tango Alpha

Why are 3 hubs not economically efficient?

Basing a couple of aircrafts in a certain (different) place is not that complicated. We are not talking about mass production; like let’s say making 300.000 cars a year in one place compared to 3 locations.

DU has now at least 4 European bases for long haul – with a wide body-fleet at a comparable size with SAS’.

Don’t you think, Bjørn is knowing, what he is doing?

CPH-Flyer

Right now the DY is financially and operationally performing pretty poorly on long haul. So while I still think the jury is out, the DY long haul venture is currently hardly a measure of how to do things. Operationally not in terms of load factor, but on reliability. I have my doubts on their ability to do it, based on the continued problems, but let's see.

FFlash

Interesting viewpoints going on here on this thread...

Apart from this comment, I disagree with almost everything here on the last two page...everyone has their viewpoint and mine is one Finnish

nacho

HX and another low cost carrier used to fly HKG-LGW but it didn't work out - people thought it would work because between Hong Kong and London is a busy route.

oliver2002

DY longhaul has the gold maintenance package from Boeing, executed by Monarch. So the 'couple' of aircraft here and there are not their headache. The crew doesn't mind they are all min wage.

SK longhaul needs local line maintenance at base, with spares etc. Crews need either to be based there or fly there. SK crews and local line people don't get min wage, they get the gold package.

Just to give you and idea of jobs/costs: LH in FRA and MUC have about 300 jobs connected to each widebody aircraft stationed there. MUC Airport estimated that each additional widebody in MUC created 2400-3200 jobs. And this is for a hub that has 30+ widebodies stationed there with an airline/MRO outfit that has all or most of the painful productivity measures behind them, SK is still 10 years behind on that one.

UltraRant

The problem with that is that there's also a lot of competition on the route, which makes that prices will generally remain low. In that case the price difference with a legacy carrier and a price fighter will generally be so little (and sometimes completely vanished by additional services like luggage, meals, seat belts, etc) that most people will stick to 'their' carrier where they for example have status, have company agreements, are used to fly with or have heard about the 'dangers' of flying lcc's.

This is also why I was a tad surprised to find that SK will fly to HKG. There's no *A hub there, there's massive competition to the place and, for what I know, slots are quite expensive. I have the feeling the route won't be established as fast as the SFO route...

FlyingMoose

From bc.se:

"Rickard var nöjd med bokningsläget på Hong Kong-linjen och sa att den såg bättre ut än exempelvis linjerna till San Francisco och Shanghai gjorde vid motsvarande tidpunkt, alltså knappt en månad innan lansering"

TLDR translation, HKG is looking good on paper.

My employer has booked tickets for a considerable amount of $$$$$ already. A direct ARN-HKG route greatly improves travel time and experience compared to connecting in LHR/FRA/ZUR. While some people don't like the timing, for Stockholm based travellers they are excellent.