Articles tagged “sas”

Scandinavia's two largest airlines, SAS and Norwegian Air, may see pre-pandemic travel trends returning but both face their own restructuring challenges.

Scandinavian airline SAS and its pilot unions reached a deal late on Monday that ended a 15-day strike.

The list of pandemic airline bankruptcies keeps growing even as travel bounces back faster than anticipated. But hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars in government aid didn't save SAS, which became the latest victim Tuesday.

The pandemic took its latest aviation victim with Scandinavia's SAS filing for Chapter 11 Tuesday. But the bankruptcy is more about extracting cost savings from aircraft lessors than breaking a pilots strike that has grounded much of the airline.

The years-long business transformation at Scandinavia's SAS could be derailed unless the airline can pry more costs out its operations. If it can't CEO Anko Van der Werff is threatening the European equivalent of bankruptcy protection.

SAS is confronting a radically different Scandinavian airline market now than it had at the start of the pandemic. New competition from startups like Flyr and a restructured Norwegian Air mean SAS will have to continue cutting costs in order to stay competitive.

In terms of saving the planet, the next best thing to not flying long-haul could be flying on a plane that uses sustainable fuel. Many companies are buying into this now, but it's still early days.

It's easy to feel jaded about data breaches given how often they happen. But it will raise eyebrows that hackers obtained data on loyalty flyers of Cathay Pacific, Finnair, Japan Airlines, Lufthansa, Malaysia Airlines, Singapore Airlines, United, and other carriers by exploiting a SITA tech system not used by most of them.

IDeaS, which makes software to help hotel owners set their room rates, boosted its financial performance in 2020 without layoffs. But this year brings unique market conditions for its hotel customers. So a lot depends on the launch of its new service, Optix.

SAS is correct to raise the possibility that coronavirus will stick around. If the number of cases in Europe continues to rise as we head through the rest of the year, the impact on airlines in the region is only going to increase. The big caveat though, is that fuel prices are likely to remain pretty low in that scenario.