Summer Skiing and Ice Hotels: Atlanta-Copenhagen Flight Unlocks Northern Europe for Southerners

It takes a village to raise a flight.

That’s the approach of Scandinavian Airlines, or SAS, which entered the Atlanta market this week with its inaugural nonstop touching down from Copenhagen Monday.

While some new entrants face fierce competition from Delta Air Lines, the hometown carrier that operates one of the world’s largest single-airline hubs at Hartsfield-Jackson, SAS is intent on becoming a member of Delta’s family.

“It’s really like having a new baby,” SAS CEO Anko Van der Werff said of the new flight in a Global Atlanta interview. “Everyone’s really upbeat. Everybody likes it. It’s a sign of growth and health, a sign that you’re doing something.”

Coming to fruition in just six months after the announcement in January, the welcome for SAS’s first-ever Atlanta flight has enjoyed an extraordinary display of Southern Hospitality, from state and city government officials down to the airport’s international affairs team.

“It feels like seriously one big rush — a really fantastic performance by all of our teams internally, but you cannot do it without the supporting hub. I’m not just trying to be polite; I really want to emphasize it: This was very, very well done by all the players here in Atlanta.”

The bonhomie can be credited in part to SAS’s decision to join the SkyTeam alliance, a move that will take effect Sept. 1 as the struggling airline continues to move ahead on its restructuring plan.

Indeed, at a “Touchdown Atlanta” luncheon at the Whitley Hotel in Buckhead, Mr. Van der Werff was surprised to hear applause after the mention of the change, which would mark the first time that a founding member of an airline alliance (Star Alliance) has switched sides.

The Atlanta crowd’s reaction came as a stark contrast to the customary response: questions from members about the status of EuroBonus points or worry about potential headaches from future tech integrations, Mr. Van der Werff said.

“Welcome to Atlanta,” said Perry Cantarutti, Delta’s senior vice president for alliances and international, who was also on the panel — to laughter and applause from the crowd.

The need for the move became clear after SAS decided to take a 19.9 percent equity investment from Air France-KLM, the French-Dutch tie-up that is both a founding member of SkyTeam and a transatlantic joint venture partner with Delta.

“It just becomes convoluted when you’ve got a major shareholder and you’re still in different alliances. That’s not really compatible,” Mr. Van der Werff said.

That investment, which requires European Commission approval, would come into effect after SAS exits its Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, perhaps by this summer.

After the decision to switch teams, SAS started looking away from Star Alliance hubs like Washington and Chicago and toward places where SkyTeam is strong. That necessarily included Atlanta, the chief executive and other executives said.

“You cannot not fly to Atlanta,” said Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Paul Verhagen during the luncheon discussion. “Being not only the busiest airport in the U.S., but also the biggest hub of our future partner.”

During the event, Mr. Van der Werff noted that Star Alliance had “held us back” by keeping SAS from experiencing “full access to partnership potentials” — including the moves toward joint ventures that have been a hallmark of Delta’s international strategy and SkyTeam’s increasing integration.

“Joint ventures build this incredible, seamless customer experience,” Mr. Van der Werff said during the event. “And the second thing is that builds a tremendous level of trust between companies — how you deal with each other, what can you build together. That togetherness is something that I have seen throughout my 25 years, that when you work with the partners that you really want to build something with, it’s unparalleled.”

While it will take a while to build that with Delta, Virgin Atlantic or other partners in Asia or beyond, it’s definitely an aspiration, said Mr. Van der Werff, who worked at Aeromexico as chief commercial officer when Delta bought a 49 percent stake in that airline.

“I think SkyTeam has a different sense of —belonging is maybe too philosophical — but definitely of partnerships,” he said.

For Southeast U.S. Travelers: Summer Skiing and Ice Hotels

For travelers from Atlanta and the broader Southeast, the new SAS flight unlocks some 30 new destinations, many in Northern Europe and the Baltics, that are not served by SkyTeam, said Delta’s Mr. Cantarutti.

“When you look at Atlanta, you can fly pretty much nonstop from Atlanta to just about any place in the world — except Scandinavia,” he said.

Beyond picturesque capitals like Stockholm and Oslo and 25 other cities in Sweden and Norway, places accessible with one-stop via Copenhagen include Svalbard, a Norwegian island that lies above the Arctic Circle, and Kiruna, a northern Swedish town where locals each year craft the the now-famous Icehotel each year along the Thone River.

SAS also offers service to all three Baltic countries and seven cities in Germany, including many business hubs with strong ties to Atlanta.

With the warming climate, longer winters are no longer a liability, said Mr. Van der Werff, who told of a friend who went skiing just a few weeks ago in northern Sweden.

“People are starting to go north,” he said. “Last year, with the heat waves in southern Europe, the biggest gainer, the biggest winner, was actually Denmark. That was the No. 1 country that people flocked to,” he said.

Danish Ambassador Jesper Sorenson said that while snow skiing may not be an option, Copenhagen does offer Copenhill, a waste-to-energy power plant with an urban mountain built on top. Guests can ski down on Neveplast, a specialized plastic material made to mimic snow.

That’s just one example of how sustainability is ingrained in the Scandinavian mindset, said Mr. Van der Werff.

“If you come from the United States, it’s just a different vibe,” he said.

Growing Scandinavian Business Ties With Georgia

Beyond tourism, tapping into the growing Scandinavian business community in the Southeast for corporate travel and cargo is fundamental to the flight’s success, SAS executives said.

“You’re not going to build such a long flight on leisure traffic. That’s too risky,” Mr. Van der Werff said.

With load factors (proportion of seats sold) approaching 90 percent on the passenger side, cargo was fully booked on the inaugural flights, a positive sign for an airline that does business with the likes of Novo Nordisk and other pharmaceutical companies, the CEO added.

Mr. Sorenson, the ambassador, said that the South is on the minds of more and more Danish companies like Kamstrup, the smart water meter maker whose grand opening he attended in March north of Atlanta.

“This is a testimony to what’s happening in our relationship. Our relationship between Denmark and the United States has just grown stronger and deeper in recent years,” he said. “On an everyday basis, a number of Danish companies that have not been present in the United States previously are now moving in. There are so many opportunities. There are many incentives, and I think that one of the regions where this is happening is right here in Georgia, in Atlanta and in this region of the U.S.”

As discussed when the ambassador met with roundtable of Danish executives in March, the Danish Chamber of Commerce of Georgia is starting up again, having recently elected a new board of directors.

Peter Vang Jensen, a former Danish trade commissioner in Atlanta, has been named the new president. He remembers visiting the SAS headquarters in Stockholm in 1981 with a delegation of Atlanta business leaders including architect and developer John Portman, who served as honorary consul of Denmark at the time, to pitch Atlanta as the airline’s next destination.

The timing was a bit too early, he conceded in an email to Global Atlanta.

“SAS executives listened politely to our promotion, then quickly forgot it. Until now, 43 years later.”

The daily flight has 262 seats and will operate five times weekly in the winter.