Best route/airline for SFO > STO > LHR in J class?
 

I need to be in Stockholm on 7/8 and in London on 7/15 next summer for work. Taking my wife and daughter and going to spend some time in Sweden and the UK before/after my work commitment.

I will be using CapitalOne cash rewards to book the tickets, and we'll be flying in J. Just searching for fares, it seems cheaper to fly RT from SFO to STO (I see a fare for $2,600 on SAS, with short layover at CPH), and then book a RT from STO to LHR?

I tried a multi-city fare using Hipmunk but that came out more expensive.

Any tips from those more familiar with flying from the west coast of the U.S. to Europe would be appreciated.

in general, the biggest risk is having your London-ARN (which is the actual code for Stockholm) leg on a different ticket (or, worse, a different airline, in the interest of saving a few dollars) from ARN-SFO: if you're delayed out of London to where you'll miss the departure for home, the originating airline has no responsibility to get you anywhere other than ARN, and once you get there, SAS has no responsibility to reaccommodate you unless you buy a walk-up fare

a better option might be to look at an open-jaw (SFO-ARN and LHR-SFO); in this case, the one-way from ARN to London can easily be on a stand-alone ticket or a different airline

Thanks for your response. I'm not familiar with open jaws; any tips on how to book them?

it's basically multi-city; first leg is SFO-ARN and second leg is LHR-SFO

Got it. I found an article on how to book open jaw flights using Google Matrix ITA and Hipmunk.

Thing is, cheapest I can get for SFO > ARN and LHR > SFO is $4k on Swiss Air.

It looks like it's cheaper to fly from SFO to ARN round trip on SAS (via CPH) for $2,600 in J, and then maybe just buy Y class round trip from ARN to LHR for the London stay for around $150.

But I'm not familiar with J class on SAS, so I'll have to look into that.

I don't think a multi-city or O/J is going to help you here. ARN is one of the cheapest markets for TATL business class travel, LHR/LON one of the most expensive. On top of that the LHR-SFO leg hits you with the maximum UK air passenger duty as a long-haul, premium-class flight (GBP150). With the three of you that's nearly $600 USD just in additional taxes. If you could find a competitive fare on British Airways SFO-LHR-ARN, you could probably do the stopover in London on the way back for "free" (extra taxes would still be calculated, though), but that might be significantly more expensive than SAS.

A nested ticket ARN > LON > ARN works fine, just allow some extra time on the way back to avoid misconnections. SAS has 5x daily LHR>ARN, so a delay of more than half a day is very unlikely.

You could also try ARN > LON > CPH to make your return trip a bit simpler as SFO-ARN / CPH-SFO may not cost you any more than SFO-ARN R/T.

Edited to add: also check Norwegian for ARN > LGW, they have 5x daily on this route and likely cheaper than SAS.

That would definitely simplify things, thanks for the suggestion.