livious

SAS had been blocking the summer holiday period in recent years but eventually opened up availability around this time of year. Last year we booked our kids on Jan 10 for their summer holiday (June 28-July 20 flying MMX-ARN-CPH-ORD and returning the same). I would keep an eye out for availability release in the near future.

LAX

I guess this explains why there was no availability when I searched even though I was able to find fares for adults. Are there other restrictions on these fares besides age?

LAX

livious

Over the years SAS has slowly restricted the availability of the fares while, in my experience, making them less attractive in terms of cost. You can still find cheap fares, so they are still a great value...but only when you can find them. In terms of restrictions, the youth fares tend to be blacked out around school holidays well in advance. Availability does eventually open up, but you might need to be patient and keep checking back. It also might depend if you are looking for feeder flights. I have noted the reduction if feeder flights combined with the reduction in youth fare seats have forced us to be a bit more flexible in the dates of the bookings. For example, MMX-ARN-ORD is usually cheaper than CPH-ORD but the availability of the MMX-ARN flight is often then limit. Then again, we have been known to book the occasional MMX-ARN-CPH-ORD voucher run when it comes available, so YMMV.

Please note my comments are based on experience booking youth tickets Scandi-US and not the other way around. In terms of school holidays, I refer to Sportlov (specifically week 8 in Skåne), hostlov (last week of October/first week of November) and Sommarlov (Jun 15- Aug 15). We have always found availability in the end, but summer has proven to be tricky in recent years.

samuelx

Hi!

Has anyone been able to find youth fares (V class) on Matrix? Any way to get it to show those as well? When I specify V class as an extension code, I find no SK flights, even though they are shown on flysas.com.

Nick Art

Youth fares are either O or V and require availability of the underlying classes to be bookable.

While not possible to look for youth fares on the matrix afaik, you can look for the underlying booking class to get a sense on which days there may be availability.

Affe_3000

When was the last time anyone saw an available SAS youth ticket to Asia? I have searched for that in half a year but without any results. I want to buy a SAS youth ticket to Tokyo but that seems impossible
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Nick Art

Welcome to FT!

Finding Youth fares to Tokyo can be very difficult as they are quite rare. Currently the Tokyo route is not operating daily anymore and SAS is closing some of the underlying fare buckets which are necessary for Youth fares to be available. This does not mean it is impossible, just recently a friends of mine booked a round trip youth fare from CPH to HND in April for travel last August. He may have been incredibly lucky with his timing though as in that instance the youth fares were only available for a few days and very gone very quickly.

nacho

April was a good time to score cheap ticket as Japan was just open at that time.

If you look at SK's tickets to Asia they are not cheap unless you can leave last minute (maybe with a couple of weeks notice). The best bet would be late January (I did see Y award at that time).

priobagtag

Was taking a look today and see both NRT and PVG availability in off-peak months. ~600-700 Euros roundtrip from Scandinavia. It is spotty though, but there are some week-long trips that could be done. Can't find any Youth availability to BKK though.

nacho

Yeah and you can also use 30k points to redeem a flight during those off-peak periods. Does SK still fly to PEK? Forget about BKK - it's too popular to sell it at a discount to young people.

danielstrandby

SK's only long-haul Asian destination are PVG, HND, and BKK for the moment. Before covid, HKG and PEK were served but AvdW has said in March that they are unlikely to add more Asian flights until Russian overflight is possible again (though BKK was then announced less than two months later but its southern location compared to PEK makes the diversion more tolerable).

PVG looks to have consistent youth fare availability for all three weekly flights except for peak periods, though at around DKK 5000 return from in youth light from CPH so not exactly cheap. Just as with all of SAS' other tickets, it is usually much cheaper to fly from ARN/OSL/BGO/etc via CPH. HND and PVG also have decent award space availability.

nacho

The war is not going end anytime soon, so what's SK going to do?

I think the downturn in the Chinese economy also makes SAS less likely to return to PEK. PVG is a more of the Chinese business city so it makes sense to keep that route, while CA is still flying into PEK (since they are friend with Putin so they can make use of the empty Russia air space). It seems that there are quite some available seats to China but it takes a bit of planning due to having to get a visa to go to China.

5000kr. for a youth ticket to PVG is expensive, adding another 1000kr for the visa makes it not attractive to go. I don't see much HND award space when I checked last time.

Aeroflot is starting Moscow to Hong Kong soon.

CPH-Flyer

One does not necessarily need a visa to China, just plan it as a transit to a 3rd country (which does actually include Hong Kong) and you get up to 144 hours visa free. Of course that does make the ticket a bit more complex.

nacho

It is indeed more complicated if you try to milk the 144h transit visa by getting an extra ticket to the third country. My kids used it once (sent them from PEK to HKG as UMs) and I was at landside at PEK for 3,5h after their flight landed. It didn't end well - fortunately they were together so they weren't scared or anything.

144 hours in the area around the airport - so if you are flying into PEK you can't take HSR to Shanghai for a day or 2. As you know you need your passport to buy HSR tickets and hotels do check the visa when checking into any hotel.