I’m off to Europe on a short SkyTeam adventure on SAS and KLM on two of my favorite aircraft, an A350-900 and 787-10.
SAS A350-900 + KLM 787-10 Business Class: The Safe But Boring Option
Almost a year ago, I decided I wanted to review a KLM 787-10 Dreamliner in business class…I’ve reviewed the A330, 777, and 787-9 in the front cabin, but not the 787-10 (though you can read my economy class review here).
To book, I used the Flying Blue award calendar (just don’t put in a travel date when you search and it will revert to a 12-month calendar showing the lowest daily price) to find a date with cheap “saver” availability on the Amsterdam – Los Angeles sector…but found nothing. However, KLM uses “married segment” logic (read my primer here) and I found a ticket from Prague – Amsterdam – Los Angeles in business class for 50K miles…a great deal.
A couple of days ago I asked for your tips on what to do and where to eat Prague, which I found very helpful: I’m very thankful for Live And Let’s Fly readers and I am quite excited to spend a couple of nights in Prague, a city I have not been to in 20 years.
That left the outbound to book and I happened to fall into two million SAS miles last December, so I figured I’d just stick to SkyTeam. Sure enough, business class space opened on SAS for 50K miles one-way from Los Angeles to Prague via Copenhagen.
(As an aside, I’ve been generally happy with EuroBonus and even managed to book an upcoming family trip…but if a flight does not have saver space, the pricing is laughably absurd…like 1.4 million points for a one-way business class ticket!)
We’ll see if I am treated as an enemy hostile on SAS… 😉
I’ll provide live updates along the way and very much look forward to this little getaway.
image: SAS
How many miles for the outbound? I know nothing about Eurobonus
Never mind. 50k
That’s a good deal- it’s rare to see married segments less than 60k for hops across the pond on FB these days.
60K is the new price floor. This was booked before the increase.
why not a review in Coach
I’ve already reviewed both products in coach—you can find reviews on this blog and I linked to the KLM one in my story.
Good work finding an SAS award. Was it far in advance or close to departure?
Also good work managing to find availability for your family, especially at saver, those are rare to come by. Looked at an ATL-CPH flight for feb 2026 and it was 433,000 points… yeah not happening.
I booked the SAS award one week in advance for this trip.
The family award was booked two months in advance and I got Plus space…business would be great, but I’ll take what I can get for 40K one-way when I need four seats.
Congrats on your redemptions, I missed your last post soliciting recommendations but I just left you one on that article about a great sauna experience to check out.
Thanks, Matt.
I do a lot of cheap long haul business class award travel with SAS. I get treated the same as on my regular paid business class fares on the same long-haul routes.
By the way, SAS still has a lot of million point promo runners who are waiting to get credited with the 10k, 100k or 1 million points for that promo. That they haven’t paid out the 10k and 100k points tells me that they know they haven’t gotten around to a lot of the people with 11-14 credited SkyTeam airlines who are waiting for the 15th and/or 16th SkyTeam airline to credit to the accounts.
I’ve recently gotten my 16th and 17th airlines credited, and they obviously did it manually as they managed to get one of the airport codes mixed up and create a route that doesn’t even exist, so I’m surprised to see that they’re still not done with the pending claims of fellow millionaires.
Sounds good. I’ve never been on a SAS flight longer than 1.5 hour and would love to try them out intercontinentally, but award availability definitely seems rather challenging, particularly for the Asian routes. Even without the political turbulence stuff, the USA is expensive to visit and inconvenient to transit so my million seems destined to mostly go to AF flights to Africa and maybe the odd niche redemption on Garuda. I’m not holding my breath on the possibility of SK returning to South America (they used to fly to MVD and EZE in the olden days!), but a MEX route would be very handy… Speaking of South America, it appears that Eurobonus has started offering redemptions on Aerolineas Argentinas so it might be an opportunity for you to review their A330 product before President Milei consigns the airline to the history books.
Would like to travel on Aerolineas Argentinas again. It has been a few years—
https://liveandletsfly.com/aerolineas-argentinas-business-class-a340-review/
It’s amazing that 2017 was 7 years ago. Feels like yesterday.
Time flies…our kids are growing up fast!
Is KLM’s traffic to the US down 70% like you stated Canada’s was?
Time will tell…I certainly hope not.
No, it’s not. But European-origin demand for travel to the US after the summer has dipped already and that seems likely to dip further despite the European currencies strengthening since the chaotic disaster US President came into power this year.
The most pro-US of Europeans have been emotionally devastated and gotten scared by the insanity coming from this lawless US Presidential administration which has gotten into bed with Putin and are way less inclined to travel and spend money doing business with the US than ever before.
GU WONDER I guess you have TDS really bad!!! How you get over it.I guess you thought Bidens 4 years were great….DAAAAA
Your guess is your guess, but the objective fact is that even baby Elon Musk is paying a price for the chaos, stupidity and incompetence of the Trump-Vance-Musk presidency and their cowardly enablers in Congress. The pitiful Trump & Co have even been out making the media rounds trying to pump up Tesla stock price. Why? Because MAGAworld’s corruption counts on Musk and other crooked oligarch’s access to cheap capital to keep MAGA’s massive anti-American fraud, waste and abuse ongoing.
Last time I was booked on KLM on a AMS-LAX flight on a 787, they swapped to a 777 on the day of travel. It was less pleasant.
If they try that on me I’m staying an extra day…