HEL - KEM - LLA - ARN - MHQ - HEL

A cold, wet Tuesday morning two weeks ago. It's 5 am in Helsinki, Finland, and I can't sleep. I'm to sign for a new job the next day, and need to figure out a good way to spend my last day of freedom. I take a shower, bag my laptop and a toothbrush and take a tram and a bus to the Helsinki-Vantaa airport (HEL). I'm going for a Nordic Quickie. :-)

.....

I stepped on to the tram at 6:18am and arrived at the airport at 7 o'clock. The cost so far: FIM 17. I had planned to fly to Stockholm, and spend the day there -- just like I had done a few months earlier. Back then I had scored a Finnair discount fare of FIM 550 for an economy round trip to Arlanda. The summer had gone, though, and with it all special fares on the HEL-ARN route. The standard fare was over FIM 1000, and I decided to try something else to stay on budget.

I walked to the domestic terminal (Terminal 1) at HEL, and on impulse bought a standby ticket to Kemi/Tornio airport (KEM). The price was FIM 348,40 after a Finnair 5% price hike whick took place that very morning. Finnair has stand-by fares available for all of their domestic routes. They are sold to people under 26 years of age or registered students under 31. These tickets are actually quite a good deal -- only a small percent of Finnair's domestic flights are absolutely packed, and the tix are fully refundable to boot.

The ticket agent informed me that the 8:55am flight had ample room, so I went straight through the security and to the Finnair domestic lounge instead of to the gate where the stand-by pax are supposed to wait. I've done this earlier, but the look on the lounge attendant's face suggested that they don't get that many visitors with youth stand-by tickets.

Anyway, the Finnair domestic lounge is very light on food and drinks, but they make it up on the reading material. I had two hours to burn (it's good to arrive early if you think you might end up standing by), so the fact that all Finnish daily newspapers were available was great. The lounge also has 802.11b access by Sonera, but it's not free-for-all -- you need a contract to use it. I don't have one, but if you do, you can get connected in all Finnair lounges in HEL and ARN. The network is also available in the major event venues in Helsinki, such as the Hartwall Arena and the Finnair Stadium.

After an hour with the newspapers, I used my PowerBook and my GPRS phone to check out where to go from Kemi. More on that later. When the boarding started, I packed my stuff and headed to Gate 17, which was just around the corner from the lounge. I entered the queue right after the businessmen with their Finnair Plus Silver and Gold cards ready. There didn't appear to be any formal priority boarding procedure, however, so I didn't get my oneworld Emerald card out. My card is from British Airways, who don't give miles for domestic flights in Finland. I had my non-status Finnair Plus number in the system to get the miles, so I didn't want to flash my BA card out of the fear that the Finnair number might get replaced.

It's good to be in front of the line when boarding a domestic flight in Finland, though, because there are no seat reservations. You just pick a seat when walking onto the plane. I picked 4A-C, and the DC-9 really had ample room -- I got to keep both seats. The flight was uneventful, and the service typically indifferent. For a few seconds I wondered if having my status on the manifest might have made a difference, but then I realized that it wasn't possible even in theory -- without reserved seats, nobody knows your name. Orange juice, coffee/tea and a sandwich were served before touchdown to Kemi -- one hour after takeoff.

The airport in Kemi is an international one, but actual international flights are probably rare. There are no jetways, and you just walk off the plane, in to the terminal -- and in to the cab, in less than a minute. No shelter from the rain either. The Kemi/Tornio airport is located, fittingly, between the cities of Kemi and Tornio -- it's 6km from Kemi and 18km from Tornio. I was more interested in Tornio, so I took a cab there. There would have been buses and shared cabs, but I was in a bit of a hurry (or so I thought), and didn't want to risk it. I ended up with a FIM 154 taxi ride and 45 minutes of free time in a small, cold, wet and empty city, so I felt kind of silly.

Anyway, the Tornio city centre consists of a few banks, grocery stores and a hamburger joint. I wasn't even hungry, so I just walked off to Sweden.

That's right -- Tornio is a border town between Finland and Helsinki. The city next to it on the other side, Haparanda, is slowly integrating itself into Tornio, and in a few years, the border will be crossing the cities' combined centre. But frankly, Haparanda wasn't the city of my dreams. It is basically built around huge supermarkets that make money selling food to people from Finland. The FIM-SEK exchange rate makes Swedish prices very affordable to Finns right now.

I still wanted to get to Stockholm, and I had spend some time in the Finnair lounge to find out exactly how I might accomplish this. At 10:30 am, I was standing at the Haparanda bus station, waiting for a local bus to take me to Lule�. The bus fare was SEK 106, and the ride took about two hours. I really liked the scenery of northern Sweden passing by, and boy, did it pass by fast! The regular roads in northern Sweden have a speed limit of 110km/h, and the driver interpreted this as the minimum speed. After I saw the driver talking to a cell phone and with one hand steering to avoid a flock of reindeer that was crossing the road, I decided that I needed to block out all of this. So I took out my PowerBook, placed it on to the seat next of mine and listened to my ABBA mp3 collection while slowly travelling towards Stockholm.

Lule� seemed nice. It was still raining, but I could imagine the place on a warm, sunny summer day. I ran around the city centre for a while, trying to find a Nordbanken bank. I have an account with them, and I could withdraw some SEKs without any costs -- this compared to the 2,5% cost of taking a Visa cash advance. By now, it was 1 pm, and my LLA-ARN flight was leaving in 55 minutes. I took a cab to the airport 9km away, and paid SEK 180. This was an inflated price, but I didn't protest because the cab driver was really nice and gave me some good info on the load factors of the Lule� - Stockholm flights.

Again, I got to use youth stand-by fares. With SAS, they are completely automatised -- you get the ticket from a vending machine which accepts notes and coins. The price was SEK 280, and the machine spitted out a boarding pass with a seat number (31F). I guess the load was light enough to just give me a seat, foregoing the whole stand-by procedure.

The plane was a spanking new 737-800 in a domestic one-class 3+3 configuration. I've always sat up front in these birds, so getting a seat in the last full row was a new experience. You could see all the way to the cockpit from where I was sitting, across the 31 rows. It had never occured to me how big the 737-800 actually is. I kept imagining the Boeing Business Jet 2 which is based on the same airframe. You can easily imagine a couple of cabins with king-size beds in one, still leaving enough room to duplicate the interiors of a Gulfstream...

This was the day after SK686, but the cabin crew was exceptionally cheerful. They joked and laughed together, totally uninhibited, from the start of boarding to the pushback. On the other hand this seemed a tad inappropriate, but I guess there is no reason to make the passengers' natural tension any worse by keeping the disaster in fresh memory. When the plane reached V1 and V2, I was, for the first time in my life, subconsciously afraid that we might hit something on the runway.

The inflight service was nice and the cabin crew kept smiling for the duration of the flight. Food and drink service was similar to Finnair's, but we were served a tray instead of a paper bag (as with Finnair). Of notice was SAS' fruit and drink service at the departure gate. It was a similar offering to Finnair's domestic lounge, but obviously available to all passengers. Nice!

We touched down at Stockholm-Arlanda at 3 pm. I had an extra Arlanda Express ticket (valued at SEK 140), so I was at the city centre only half an hour later. So, I had met my primary objective of getting into Stockholm that day. However, I still had to figure out a way to get back -- I needed to get to work the next day. There were no cheap one-way ARN-HEL fares available. Or actually there was -- jetweb.se offered a good youth fare of 470 SEK, but I was afraid I couldn't book it on the same day.

So, after spending an hour in Stockholm, doing all the things you do in Stockholm when you have an hour, I took the subway to G�rdet. This is where Silja Line's big Helsinki - Stockholm ships dock at Stockholm. I managed to get a Promenade-class cabin for a STO-HEL-STO cruise at SEK 830.
With 15 minutes to spare, I boarded my ship, the Silja Symphony.

Two companies dominate the cruise business between Stockholm and Helsinki -- the Mariehamn-based Viking line and the Helsinki-based Silja Line. Both companies operate a route that stops at Mariehamn -- the �land islands are not a part of the EU, and a stop there enables the companies to sell tax-free goods such a tobacco and alcohol. Both companies rely on alcohol sales for their bottom line, but it's easy to see that Viking is the low-end and Silja the high-end product. So, I was able to have a classy dinner at Silja's Bon Vivant restaurant, dance the night away in the ship's discotheque and finally retire to my own 13m2 cabin with a view to the Promenade deck that hosts the ship's restaurants and shops.

The next day, I was able to sleep late in the cabin (because I was due to go back to Stockholm in it), and go straight to my contract signing at 2 pm. I didn't catch the return to Stockholm, though.. Some other time!

.....

In the end, it was a nice day trip to some places I hadn't seen before (Tornio and Lule�). My cab fares were a big part of the total costs -- something which could've been avoided. If I end up pulling a stunt like this again, I will experiment with public transportation more.

So, the total costs:

FIM 520
SEK 1396

Was is worth it? At least I have yet another silly story to tell...

Enjoyed your report, Markonen. Being a Finnair Plus member myself, I'd love to know more about those standby fares you mentioned. Are they sold only within Finland for domestic flights, or also internationally and/or for international flights? Do they give you tier points or mileage in an associated program (like AAdvantage or Qualiflyer)?

Thanks
airoli

Something of an adventure! Just turn up at airports/towns and see where you can go.

But what if you had been stuck somewhere? Would you just look for a cheap hotel too?

The vending machines in Sweden for youth tickets. How is the under 26 check made? Do you have to give your ID number?

Save your boarding pass for the domestic Sweden ticket Markonen. Take a look at this http://www.scandinavian.net/travel/se/youth/english.asp

airoli, SAS and Finnair offer these domestic stand-by fares for domestic flights only, and by their nature the tickets are only available at the airport. You don't have to be a Swedish or Finnish national, however.

The only thing I know about the mileage is the special bonus kempis mentioned for the SAS flights and the fact that the Finnair flights earn regular mileage in Finnair's own program.

Austman, I cheated a little and looked up stuff about the next stop on my laptop. I investigated bus schedules in northern Sweden while at the Finnair lounge in Helsinki, and tried to make sure I could get to the harbour in time while sitting at the Lule� airport. In any case, nothing was ever for certain and I could've ended up in a cheap hotel somewhere.

Nowadays SAS requires ID on boarding, so that's where they check your age.

Thanks for the info. I'll check it out the next time I am in HEL.