SAS flight cost variations for mid August 2024

How are you planning to return? From someplace in Italy? Looking at SAS flights on their website, while there are direct (and reasonably-priced) flights SFO-CPN, the return from Italy involves 3 flights—-the first to Arlanda, then to CPN, and finally the long flight to SFO. But the price in Business Class in August is lower for that 3-leg flight ($1648) than the direct CPN-SFO flight if booked alone ($1750).

Lola, to make flying easier on us the plan is:

Business class SFO to CPH. Spend some days in Copenhagen.

Economy multi-city, CPH - MXP (Milan), (Rome) FCO - CPH

We will be spending around 3 weeks in Italy.

Nobody has a crystal ball indicating when is the best time to buy plane tickets at the least expensive airfare. If you see a price that works with your budget, take it especially that you will travel in August which is one of the most popular times of year North Americans travel to and from Europe.

That under $3500 price I saw for a multi-city trip looked pretty darn good for Business Class at high season. (I did not include the CPH to Milan flight in that).

I have only seen lower prices than that for winter travel—-some forum members scored sale prices on British Airways in Business Class SEA to London RT for around $2600 in early 2023 (or maybe that was early 2022—I lose track of the years these days). But the same itinerary, same dates, that I priced on SAS is $4300 on British Airways right now.

Lola, funny, I also confuse the years. I can blame senioritis.

Les, Google Flights should have a graph and price history to help your research. Google Flights also can show you the price for everyday of a particular month, so you can determine if flying a day earlier or later would save you money. You can set up price alerts to email you when prices for specific routes change.

Last July, 2023, I found British Airways business class RT flights from LAX to Amsterdam for $1850 each. I got to this price with the help of the AARP discount stacked with the British Airlines Visa discount. I booked directly with British Airways. Before those discounts, the business class fares were around $2200 RT each, which is still great.
I would have preferred leaving from San Diego, but we haven't had any great business class prices from here since precovid, and San Diego has been double the LAX price.
SFO is a major airport, so that might increase your chances for a good rate.
Anyhow, just a lucky example of what you might be able to pay. In the past dozen years I have averaged $2500 each RT for business class to Europe.
What worked for me was just searching on my own with Google Flights, using several different destinations. Once I found a low business class rate for one European city, I knew it was possible. Every few days I plugged in other cities, until I got lucky. I actually found my price a day before Google Flights sent me the alert.
Interestingly, when I found our great price, I checked and economy was the same price! I had just assumed all the prices categories went down during a fare sale.
Anyhow, I am meandering , but there's no science here, just luck, but if you're persistent and have the time, you might be rewarded.
Good luck!

OK, now I see you are planning on flying back in Economy, is that correct? That brings the price down to $2300. I might not wait on that one, but that’s just me. . . . Even if the price was lower in the pat (according to Google), that doesn’t mean it will go back down in the future. The one time I actually tracked flight prices for summer travel to Europe, just out of curiosity, I saw them start rising after January, and just keep going up, and up. This was on British Airways.

Pat those are interesting comments. I use Google Flights a lot. I think the past price history (corrent me if wrong) is not available but forward tracking is. I did not add that we would like to make the US to Europe flight a nonstop one. If there were an easy 1 stop maybe that would work. I will test out the various international Europe airports: CDG, FRA, ZUR, CPH, LHR ... etc. So far CPH comes out pretty good.

Lola, the idea is to make the round trip to Europe as easy as possible, so round trip in business class. Short economy flights in Europe are fine then. We have not been to Scandinavia so my wife is interested in Copenhagen for a few days. Trying to avoid cold weather as she is somewhat fragile to that hence the mid-August visit.

Thanks so far for all the comments. :)

OK, good. Roundtrip in Business Class is nice (what we do as much as possible, but I book with miles).

Swiss has direct flights from SFO to Zurich, but their price for a RT in Business Class on that route is over $6000. Which makes that $3500 price on SAS all the more attractive.

And ITA, the new Italian airline, offers direct flights from SFO to Rome. You could reverse your trip and fly to Rome, add a short hop to Copenhagen and back to Italy. But the RT SFO to FCO and back in Business Class on the same dates in August would be $6300. Again, making SAS the winner,.

We did a codeshare with United a few years ago, Business Class, using Swiss Air direct SFO - Zurich, and a return direct on Lufthansa Frankfurt- SFO, all one ticket. The only negative was we could not choose our seats. However, it was Business Class, and honestly, I had no complaints.
Safe travels and Happy Holidays!