Searching European airfare rates from the US

I think if you look at a flight from Stockholm to Paris, your price will be quoted in Swedish Krona, so you have to do a currency conversion to get the price in USD.

Where are you looking to fly from in the U.S.?

Mm, interesting. We were planning on flying in and out of Arlanda. So maybe into Arlanda and out of somewhere else?

I used to book on Asia-based websites from the US when I was an expat. For me, it was a simple matter of going to the airlines website and changing to the Asia based version on the home page.

I looked at the SAS homepage out of curiousity. Easy to switch country to Sweden. I do not know if there is some sort of check for ISP that would read "USA". Perhaps you need a VPN to see the same prices that you would see if physically in Sweden.

we'd like to take a weekend side-trip to another European city while we're there

Instead of a flight, why not take the overnight ferry to Tallinn or Helsinki (or potentially visit both on the same trip)?

Another option would be to fly into Stockholm Arlanda and home from another city (a multi-city flight). Buy a one-way flight between ARN and the other European city.

You can go to the airport website, open the departures page, filter on your destination, and see which airlines service the route. Then go to that airline's website to look at prices.

Keep in mind that Stockholm is served by four airports, and some budget airlines may use Skavsta Airport instead of Arlanda.

If you're looking for tickets from Stockholm to Paris, you have a look at what SAS and Air France has to offer. www.flysas.com or www.airfrance.com

For other destinations, there are other airlines as well. A good start can be SAS' low price calender, showing what cheap destinations are available. It can be found here: https://www.sas.se/lagpriskalender/ In Swedish, but should be easy enough to understand. Prices in SEK.

But don't focus to much on flying. A ferry trip to Finland or Tallinn is a great option. Or maybe to Visby. There are also good train network and plenty of towns and cities that are easy to reach with a short train trip, including Oslo and Copenhagen.

And while Stockholm has four airports, Arlanda is by far the largest one. Last month, the other three combined had around 7% of Arlanda's passenger numbers.