Charming Concept: SAS Café Lounge

SAS offers a charming lounge concept at five smaller airports: lounge cafés.

SAS bases operations out of three Scandinavian hubs: Copenhagen, Oslo, and Stockholm, but serves 40 Scandinavian destinations. Some of these cities are too small to support a full lounge but to small or competitive to offer nothing. SAS has found a middle way through a concept it calls lounge cafés, available in the following five airports:

Malmoe, Sweden
Lulea, Sweden
Tromsø, Norway
Trondheim, Norway
Ålesund, Norway

I had a chance to visit the SAS Lounge Café in Tromsø during a long layover.

The lounge constitutes a small rectangular single room with two rows of bench-style seating and some additional round tables. The only food and drink is a a coffee and juice machine, fresh bread, cookies and cinnamon rolls. It was quite crowded when we arrived in the mid-afternoon but emptied out by late evening. Internet worked well and a single attendant was on hand to restock food and help people who had trouble scanning into the lounge.

a glass building with a sign

a glass wall with a sign in the middle of a building

a sign on a window

a room with a computer screen and plants

a group of tables in a room with a window

a group of people sitting at tables in a room with potted plants

a group of people sitting at a table

a room with tables and chairs and plants

a room with tables and chairs

a table with small potted plants

a white plug in outlet

a counter with food on it

baskets of bread and cookies on a counter

a group of bowls of cookies

baskets of food in a basket

a cinnamon roll and a cup of coffee on a plate

Warning: the cinnamon rolls went like Black Friday specials at Walmart. I chuckled that each time the lounge agent brought out a fresh basket of rolls, passengers descended upon them like vultures on a carcass.

Like other SAS lounge, the lounge opens an hour before the first flight and closes 30 minutes before the last departs. Although not explicit on the SAS website, this is Star Alliance Gold lounge.

CONCLUSION

While I naturally would have preferred a full lounge, this lounge represents a charming concept and was far better than waiting in the gate area for my fight to Stockholm.

2 Comments

henry LAX Reply

July 20, 2017 at 4:01 pm

SAS Schengen lounge at Goteborg (GOT) has a similar feel and charm even though it’s billed as a full service lounge. I love flying utilizing SAS and the peaceful oasis’ of OSL/ARN/CPH over the chaos that is FRA.

on a side note, the 2nd sentence sounds slightly off syntactically.
Gene Reply

July 20, 2017 at 4:04 pm

@ Matthew — The FCQ and I have visited the lounge in Tromso. After getting over the horror of the commonness of the lounge, it turned out to be OK. Definitely NOT fit for a Queen.