jamesbrownontheroad

You can go anywhere, as long as it's Stockholm. Typical departure board at UME some time earlier this year.


Rather than a third airline feeding ARN alongside SK and DY, I hold thumbs and hope to see another network airline feeding another European hub. It’s depressing as anything to start all of my trips from UME where the departure board lists nothing but three airlines to Stockholm ARN and BMA.

If it weren’t for the capacity constraints at AMS, I’d love to see KL CityHopper night stopping at more secondary Swedish airports to feed their network at Schiphol.

For that matter, I reckon that LH could profitably fill a CRJ with connections from UME-FRA twice a day.

GUWonder

Multiple hubs has been part of SAS’s troubles. AY follow in SK’s footsteps and expect better results just because? That would sound like a recipe for further financial trouble for AY and SK too.

nacho

LH has double hub too. FRA and MUC is like 3h by train. I know there's 80M population in Germany vs 15M (SE + FI). I don't know if there's a business case but that might be a possibility if SAS does go bankrupt.

I don't know if SAS can even run properly with one hub.

CPH-Flyer

Plus the point that probably Lufthansa has more widebody planes in each hub than AY and SK has combined. Fleet sizes matters here.

oliver2002

Actually they have 5 hubs: VIE/MUC/FRA/ZRH/BRU. And GVA is a mini hub for LX. OS/VIE and SN/BRU have some niche markets that just about justify the expense of running a hub. AFKL has CDG & AMS; IAG has MAD/LHR with some hub type activity in LGW & BCN too.

GUWonder

And without their granted government favors, geographical position and the far-flung colonial legacy trail, most of those would have struggled even more than they have. ARN is just way out of the way, and Sweden's colonial legacy trail is such that it's not reaping it much with a combination of VFR traffic and premium cabin demand from local employers and the rest of the home country market.

SK is too late to the game to make a hub into a DXB/DOH/IST or SIN. And it's also too late to the game to make a hub into what AY did with HEL. And ARN is the wrong place to try to do it anyway -- and even more the wrong place to do it now than before.

FlyingMoose

I'm not invested in AY at all, SK already has long haul operations, a short haul network and their main issue is the timing of the flights, they are to early. They could easily support West Coast routes with the infrastructure and demand there is today.

GUWonder

While I would love to have all my SK Scandinavia-US flights scheduled for post-5pm departures and all my SK flights in the other direction able to get me into CPH and ARN by 6:30am , SK seems to think it’s better for their fleet utilization and revenue maximization to not cater to my schedule.

Given what I’ve seen of the economy class fares for some of the US West Coast-ARN/CPH flights, not sure SAS can do worse even if they cater to any of our desired schedules. That said, it wouldn’t surprise me if SAS would do itself better longer term by cutting back on its own West Coast service.

nacho

It's very rare to see TATL US bound departures after 5pm. Leaving LAX to CPH at 11/12 is not so nice either, I prefer catching a red eye back.

GUWonder

While the vast majority indeed leave before 5pm, there are some scheduled 5pm and later Europe-US departures from LHR, AMS and CDG — with BOS, JFK and IAD as the destinations where I’ve benefited from these 5+ pm options to get me back to the US.

I would really love it if the CPH-ORD schedule was moved just one hour later to 4:40pm departures, but I doubt that SAS wants to have to pick up the tab to make that happen.

GUWonder

Swedish passport applications are taking a long time to turn around. Quite amazed how bad it has gotten, but it may be good for award space.

Apparently, the government wants to blame equipment issues in Finland. If they only had increased Swedish passport validity periods by 2-5 years, the turnaround times would never have gotten to be this bad.

The backlog for even getting a Swedish passport in the UK must be truly eye-watering for some when it’s this bad even for applications inside Sweden.

fassy

Well, as a German renewing my passport in the German embassy in Stockholm is a pretty messed up procedure. You have to book an appointment about 4 - 6 months in the future. But not to get your passport... Oh no! You have to send in paperwork by post until that day. On the given day, they will look at the application and then call you up to make an appointment in person a couple of months later. So it is something between 8 and 12 months now, to renew my passport.

They introduced this madness together with their Covid19 lockdown. Before that, it was about a 6 weeks wait to get an appointment in person where you could fix all in one go.

Oh, and if you don't have a residence in Germany.... it is not even an option to fly to Berlin or Hamburg anymore and get the passport done there. Only in real emergencies and then the process is similar messed up. They will call the embassy of the country you reside in to get "permission" to issue a passport. And if they can't reach the person responsible in the embassy... come back tomorrow and try again.

CPH-Flyer

I get more and more happy with the process of the Danish embassy in Tokyo. You can usually book a spot 1-2 days on advance, takes 10-15 minutes to go through the motions at the embassy. About 2 weeks later the passport arrives at the embassy via diplomatic post for pickup. If you can be without your passport for the duration add a day or two for registered mail to your home address, otherwise the time it takes to go to the embassy for pick up. No appointment needed for a pick up.

oliver2002

The main problem for the Swedes is that the plant that actually prints and manufactures the passport is/was down due to a fire. Then the biomentric kiosk that captures the data for the passport is also unique to Sweden and Finland, others do it differently.

GUWonder

If the Swedish authorities could manage to get off their paranoia kick and returned to general Swedish passport expiration periods being 5 years for kids and increasing adult passport validity to 10 years, they would not have had as much of a mess as they have had this year and had even before there was any Finnish fire to blame.

US passports for in-person applications at the US embassies in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden are typically turned around with new passports available for pickup by applicants within less than 16 calendar days of showing up at the embassies for the application. Appointments can be a challenge to land at times, but nothing like the crazy appointment problems Sweden has been having this year.