Scandinavian carrier SAS will reintroduce a business-class product on its European short-haul fleet as it seeks alignment with its new SkyTeam partners.
SAS chief commercial officer Paul Verhagen made the announcement during a panel discussion on 17 September at an event to mark the airline joining the alliance at the beginning of the month.
“Come summer 2025 we will be reintroducing a European business class,” Verhagen states, clarifying that the product will be offered on all European short-haul flights, including intra-Scandinavia services.
“As you start to align with your new friends and as you have more and more connecting passengers on to your growing intercontinental network… we have to align more and more also our cabin configuration,” he says.
Verhagen describes SAS’s current short-haul cabin configuration as featuring an economy offering – known as SAS Go – and a premium offering – known as SAS Plus – “which is definitely not an economy cabin but in all honesty cannot be called a classical business cabin either”.
That latter product will be dropped on the European short-haul network, he explains.
“Where today you have the Plus cabin, we will have a cabin that is separated by a divider where the middle seat is blocked, guaranteed, where the catering, where the food and beverage offering is up from where it is today, and of course all the ground services that come with that,” Verhagen says.
Those ground services will include fast-track security, lounge access and priority boarding, he states.
Verhagen further notes that SAS will rename its product offerings in line with those used by its new SkyTeam partners, meaning it will adopt the monikers economy, premium economy (a cabin which SAS will continue to offer on intercontinental services) and business class.
“From an industry standards perspective they are perhaps difficult concepts to understand,” he says of SAS’s current product naming convention.
Speaking on the same panel, Delta Air Lines senior vice-president for alliances and international Perry Cantarutti welcomed SAS’s product overhaul.
“This is great news,” Cantarutti says. “I flew SAS back in July from Barcelona to Copenhagen and I was in business class – we were lined up tight and I said to Ginger [Hughes, SAS chief transformation officer] ‘there is no way on behalf of Delta and the US customer that we are going to be able to sell that product – we at least need the middle seat empty’.
“So I am really delighted to hear they are moving in that direction.”
