I recently traveled on Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) between the United States and Sweden, flying premium economy from Chicago to Stockholm on the way to Sweden and business class from Copenhagen to Chicago on the way back. It was a good journey.
It will not come as a Stop the Presses moment for frequent fliers to read that business class is better than premium economy class on the same airline. That said, SAS's Economy Extra is a superior example of an increasingly popular type of service perched midway between biz and coach class. This past week, SAS won the annual award for best long-haul premium economy in a poll of frequent fliers for the U.S. monthly magazine Global Traveler (www.globaltravelerusa.com). It's not hard to see why. Unlike offerings by airlines that serve up premium economy with heavier doses of economy than premium-quality product, SAS features service that borrows more from Biz.
As the airline notes, "Economy Extra passengers on SAS's long-haul routes are seated in a separate cabin in seats that are one inch wider and offer six inches more legroom than in Economy. Other features include laptop computer power outlets at every seat, greater choice of meals and drinks and personal video screen with audio and video on demand. Economy Extra customers may use the Business check-in, have an increased baggage allowance, and access to Fast Track security, where available, and earn more EuroBonus points.''
Speaking of business class: It's good. I flew SAS biz class once before, in May 2007. It was fine then, but seems to have been upgraded, with better in-flight entertainment choices and enhanced food and drink menus. Surveys of frequent fliers show that most people care most about their seat and about on-time arrivals and departures. I care about those things, too. But on flights that can last 10 hours or so, I also care about amenities that some travelers consider frills: Namely, food and drink and ways to make the hours fly by when you're not sleeping or working: music, movies, games, TV.
As a corporation, SAS is a rather ungainly bird. The airline - which flew 25.3 million passengers in 2010 and was rated the 10th-best airline in the world by Skytrax (www.airlinequality.com) that year - is jointly owned by the governments of Norway, Sweden and Denmark with 50 percent of shares plus one more share. The rest is privately owned. None of this matters in the sky, where service from a smoothly multilingual staff nicely strikes a tricky balance between attentive and unobtrusive, polite but not fawning.
About those food and drink offerings: SAS stocks the caraway-flavored Scandinavian liquor aquavit (Aalborg Jubilaeums), savory meat (lamb on my flight), fish and vegetarian entrees and open-face sandwiches. The wine list was short but well-chosen: One of the two whites was the French product Alain Grignon Viognier 2010; one of the two reds was a good pick from Chile: Falernia Reserve Carmenere 2009.
One more thing: SAS was cited as Europe's most punctual airline in 2010 by the respected research outfit FlightStats, which tracks such things.
In sort: Good airline, good ride.
For more information: www.flysas.com/us.
Showing posts with label Scandinavian Airlines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scandinavian Airlines. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
The 2011 SAS Crew Guide
One of the gifts of the season just arrived, earmarking some great places to go in the New Year:
It is the 2011 Crew Guide, the seventh edition of a handy paperback guidebook to some of the planet's most interesting places. Uniquely, the book is written by well-traveled members of airline flight crews such as flight attendants, pilots and pursers. Originally the writers were all with Scandinavian Airlines but SAS contributors are now supplemented by writers from nine other carriers such as SAS Star Alliance partners Lufthansa and United Airlines.
The Crew Guide breaks down tips and advice into self-explanatory categories: Eat, Buy, Sleep, See, Recover. New this year are mini-profiles of photogenic crew members, matched to cities they know well. The Crew Guide is necessarily more suggestive than definitive, as the 22 cities included in its pages have to be served by at least one of the 10 participating airlines. Bangkok, Stockholm, Oslo, Brussels and the like are included - and all are worthy choices -but other worthies such as Cape Town and Buenos Aires aren't in the 351-page book.
I was just in Beijing and Tokyo, so I gravitated first to entries about those cities. The 20-page section on Beijing is good, with outstanding restaurants such as The Courtyard and 1949 Hidden City's Noodle Bar making the cut, along with some lively markets. Tokyo, as dynamic and fascinating a metropolis as any on the planet, gets just 10 pages, though an informed contributor correctly points out that some of the best dining in town takes place under the arches of the Japanese capital's railroad bridges.
The 2011 edition of the Crew Guide continues the series' infatuation with New York City - which, at 42 pages, gets just two pages fewer than Beijing, Tokyo and London combined. Mind you, I like the Big Apple, but unlike Tokyo and Beijing, it is a city whose future is behind it, and the greatest-city-in-the-world routine is debatable.
That said, this is a engaging and helpful book, well worth the 15 euros (about $20 USD) being charged for it. Wherever you roam, advice such as this from SAS crew member Dandi Si, in Beijing, will stand you in good stead when you're trying not to look like a - perish the thought! - tourist:
"Rucksacks, walking boots, and professional outdoor equipment are signs of a newcomer,'' Si says. "As too are cameras around the neck.''
You have been warned.
No, the FAs on your next flight won't be selling the book, but you can buy a copy online at http://www.sasguides.com/).
It is the 2011 Crew Guide, the seventh edition of a handy paperback guidebook to some of the planet's most interesting places. Uniquely, the book is written by well-traveled members of airline flight crews such as flight attendants, pilots and pursers. Originally the writers were all with Scandinavian Airlines but SAS contributors are now supplemented by writers from nine other carriers such as SAS Star Alliance partners Lufthansa and United Airlines.
The Crew Guide breaks down tips and advice into self-explanatory categories: Eat, Buy, Sleep, See, Recover. New this year are mini-profiles of photogenic crew members, matched to cities they know well. The Crew Guide is necessarily more suggestive than definitive, as the 22 cities included in its pages have to be served by at least one of the 10 participating airlines. Bangkok, Stockholm, Oslo, Brussels and the like are included - and all are worthy choices -but other worthies such as Cape Town and Buenos Aires aren't in the 351-page book.
I was just in Beijing and Tokyo, so I gravitated first to entries about those cities. The 20-page section on Beijing is good, with outstanding restaurants such as The Courtyard and 1949 Hidden City's Noodle Bar making the cut, along with some lively markets. Tokyo, as dynamic and fascinating a metropolis as any on the planet, gets just 10 pages, though an informed contributor correctly points out that some of the best dining in town takes place under the arches of the Japanese capital's railroad bridges.
The 2011 edition of the Crew Guide continues the series' infatuation with New York City - which, at 42 pages, gets just two pages fewer than Beijing, Tokyo and London combined. Mind you, I like the Big Apple, but unlike Tokyo and Beijing, it is a city whose future is behind it, and the greatest-city-in-the-world routine is debatable.
That said, this is a engaging and helpful book, well worth the 15 euros (about $20 USD) being charged for it. Wherever you roam, advice such as this from SAS crew member Dandi Si, in Beijing, will stand you in good stead when you're trying not to look like a - perish the thought! - tourist:
"Rucksacks, walking boots, and professional outdoor equipment are signs of a newcomer,'' Si says. "As too are cameras around the neck.''
You have been warned.
No, the FAs on your next flight won't be selling the book, but you can buy a copy online at http://www.sasguides.com/).
Friday, December 11, 2009
Read All About It: SAS Crew Guide 2010
I have written before about the SAS Crew Guide, an airline insiders' book of travel tips that's updated, coordinated and published every year by Scandinavian Airlines. Well, the latest, 6th edition of the guide, the 2010 version, is out. It's worth the 15 euros (about $22 U.S.) that SAS charges for a copy (http://www.sasguides.com/).
The Crew Guide is a compact paperback, small enough to fit into a pocket or a purse. It contains the personal recommendations of several hundred well-traveled crew members - chiefly, flight attendants, pilots and pursers - at SAS and seven other airlines, including Air Canada, Austrian Airlines and TAP Portugal. The new edition covers 22 international cities, in Europe, North America and Asia. Recommendations are bite-sized: a single sentence to a paragraph or two, and cover places to eat, shop and play (the latter usually clubs and discos). I have used earlier editions of the book on my travels and found them useful.
The 2010 edition has some new wrinkles. It starts off with top 5 picks in 20 categories - outdoor terrace, high-altitude city views, Vienna-style coffeeshops, and more - the "100 new tips'' touted on the cover. The destinations tend to closely track the SAS route structure; thus, great cities like Tokyo - which went missing this year - and good ones like Seattle, which SAS no longer serves, are no longer included. Pity. But many terrific cities are included, among them London, New York, Paris, Stockholm and next year's Olympic city, Vancouver.
I am a well-traveled fellow myself and I am a guidebook author, both of which mean I am opinionated, like the contributors to the Crew Guide. In my opinion, the Crew Guide gives far more attention than it should to New York City - 44 pages, nearly double runner-up Bangkok's 24 pages and absurdly more than Chicago's 10 and Berlin's inexcusably skimpy four. One featured destination, Canada's beautiful and enjoyable Vancouver Island, is not a city.
So, I have some quibbles. But then, as the author or co-author of five books, I well understand that no book can please everyone. This book reflects its contributors' tastes, and they have come up with plenty of good leads to entertain, instruct and guide. Besides, you have to savor a book that revels in the quirky particularity of both its contributors and its subjects:
"Absolutely the best cakes in Scandinavia,'' asserts Theis Fabech J, air host for SAS, in an endorsement of Copenhagen's Dessertdragens Kagevaerksted (http://www.dessertdragen.dk/). "Both traditional and very untraditional cakes. You can have everything from brownies to cheesecake with cucumber, depending on the day and the mood of the owner.''
The Crew Guide is a compact paperback, small enough to fit into a pocket or a purse. It contains the personal recommendations of several hundred well-traveled crew members - chiefly, flight attendants, pilots and pursers - at SAS and seven other airlines, including Air Canada, Austrian Airlines and TAP Portugal. The new edition covers 22 international cities, in Europe, North America and Asia. Recommendations are bite-sized: a single sentence to a paragraph or two, and cover places to eat, shop and play (the latter usually clubs and discos). I have used earlier editions of the book on my travels and found them useful.
The 2010 edition has some new wrinkles. It starts off with top 5 picks in 20 categories - outdoor terrace, high-altitude city views, Vienna-style coffeeshops, and more - the "100 new tips'' touted on the cover. The destinations tend to closely track the SAS route structure; thus, great cities like Tokyo - which went missing this year - and good ones like Seattle, which SAS no longer serves, are no longer included. Pity. But many terrific cities are included, among them London, New York, Paris, Stockholm and next year's Olympic city, Vancouver.
I am a well-traveled fellow myself and I am a guidebook author, both of which mean I am opinionated, like the contributors to the Crew Guide. In my opinion, the Crew Guide gives far more attention than it should to New York City - 44 pages, nearly double runner-up Bangkok's 24 pages and absurdly more than Chicago's 10 and Berlin's inexcusably skimpy four. One featured destination, Canada's beautiful and enjoyable Vancouver Island, is not a city.
So, I have some quibbles. But then, as the author or co-author of five books, I well understand that no book can please everyone. This book reflects its contributors' tastes, and they have come up with plenty of good leads to entertain, instruct and guide. Besides, you have to savor a book that revels in the quirky particularity of both its contributors and its subjects:
"Absolutely the best cakes in Scandinavia,'' asserts Theis Fabech J, air host for SAS, in an endorsement of Copenhagen's Dessertdragens Kagevaerksted (http://www.dessertdragen.dk/). "Both traditional and very untraditional cakes. You can have everything from brownies to cheesecake with cucumber, depending on the day and the mood of the owner.''
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