”If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” That seems to be the airline industry mantra as of late. For example,Lufthansa spent years talking about how Etihad and other subsidized Gulf carriers are bad for the aviation industry, but now they’re partnering with them.
Continue reading: SAS Is Launching An Irish Airline Based In London And Spain
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
My guess is that they want to take advantage of lower taxes that Ireland provides over anywhere in Scandinavia. Then they can pair that with a non-EU post Brexit base in London. Not sure why Spain is attractive. I assume it has to do with routes and labor cost which should be cheaper. I would of put a base in Ireland and used it to connect into London to reduce tax costs for passengers. But I'm no expert on that.
I like the idea of this. It's better than sitting still and being driven our of business.
I like how they mention that this is all due to "leasure" travel. It's like code for the business clients not to fly LCC's 🙂
So they are adopting norwegian business, well it is going to help them in the long run. But expect the service to be lower than it already is.
Bring it on. More competition means lower fares and more choice for the consumer. Look at how BA is scrambling to compete with Norwegian from LGW.
As long as they provide the same service as their Scandinavian colleagues I couldn't care less where crews are based. In my experience crew from places like Thailand will give much better service than European crew anyway because they're a lot more interested in keeping their jobs.
Jetstar long-haul crew are almost entirely Indonesian or Thai based, regardless of the route. They do these insanely long rosters where they swing out of their home base, crew routes between Australia and other other countries that are not their base (i.e. DPS-SYD-HNL-SYD-OOL-NRT-CNS-SYD-HKT-SYD-HNL-MEL-SIN-MEL-DPS) over the course of several weeks and then eventually get back to their home base. They give much better service than the lazy, bitter, heavily unionised Australian crew who wished they worked for QF but don't.
Norwegian needed an Irish base to be in the EU. SAS already is in the EU in Denmark, unless they know something we dont
The press release reads like something written in Swedish and run through Google translate.
Supposedly they will place 4 of their new A320neo's there on taking delivery of the planes. London and Spain are the biggest tourist destinations for SAS, so my guess is that it is for certain European routes. The hourly staff cost in the UK is currently 1/3 lower than in Scandinavia, and even lower yet in Spain.
For the long haul you need a feeder network, which SAS has towards Stockholm and Copenhagen, and to an extent Oslo. So it would be difficult for them to fill up transatlantic flights from London, and it would weaken their domestic market.