SAS Business Class Review: The Best Value Across the Atlantic

Most of what gets written about transatlantic business class is about the best seat. This is a review of the best deal, which is a different thing and a rarer one.

The scores

Our score

8.8/10

Seat

8

IFE

8

Lounge

10

Value

9

Scored against our published rubric.

8.8 out of 10 on verifiable product — third in our set of fifteen carriers, behind only Lufthansa and TAP Air Portugal.

Four dimensions, and SAS is strong on all four for different reasons. The cabin is 1-2-1 and lie-flat with direct aisle access from every seat, which is the geometry that actually decides whether you sleep. It drops two points on seat for one reason only: no privacy door. That is the entire gap between this and a 10.

It scores 9 out of 10 on Value, and it earns that across more routes than anything else in our data.

The reach is the review

Value here is not an opinion. It is computed from the carrier grid, where every airline is priced for the same fixed travel week so the difference between two rows is the airline rather than the dates.

SAS priced on 97 of the 193 routes in that grid — half of it, and more than any other carrier by nineteen routes. Almost anything from a US gateway to a European city can be routed through Copenhagen, and SAS will sell it to you. It carries a $20 median premium over the cheapest carrier on those routes and was outright cheapest on 36 of them:

Route	SAS	Cheapest rival	Verdict
LAX → VIE	$717	Air France $901	SAS by $184
ORD → HEL	$721	Lufthansa $873	SAS by $152
BOS → BER	$702	TAP Air Portugal $811	SAS by $109
JFK → AMS	$644	Air Serbia $744	SAS by $100
JFK → EDI	$723	Delta $819	SAS by $96
JFK → HEL	$589	Finnair $680	SAS by $91
JFK → OPO	$605	TAP Air Portugal $694	SAS by $89
ORD → KRK	$665	Turkish Airlines $745	SAS by $80
BOS → LHR	$636	Icelandair $683	SAS by $47

Look at where those wins are. Vienna, Berlin, Kraków, Edinburgh, Porto, Amsterdam — SAS wins across the whole map, not just the Nordics. It also takes Helsinki off Finnair, connecting New York to Helsinki for $589 against Finnair's own $680 nonstop, which is the clearest single illustration of what a well-placed hub does to a flag carrier.

Its own cheapest fare anywhere in the grid was $422, Boston to Stockholm through Copenhagen — the lowest of all 948 fares we priced.

That combination is unusual. Our best airlines analysis found the general pattern is a trade — Icelandair is cheapest and scores 0 on seat; KLM has perfect seat geometry and scores 0 on value. SAS refuses the trade, and does it on more routes than anybody.

Where it loses

It is not cheapest everywhere, and the losses are worth seeing:

Route	SAS	Cheapest rival	Verdict
LAX → FCO	$879	Royal Air Maroc $620	Royal Air Maroc by $259
JFK → FCO	$697	Norse Atlantic $461	Norse Atlantic by $236
LAX → LIS	$848	Royal Air Maroc $621	Royal Air Maroc by $227
JFK → FRA	$809	TAP Air Portugal $591	TAP Air Portugal by $218
BOS → ZRH	$759	Icelandair $548	Icelandair by $211

The pattern is geographic and it held once the grid tripled in size. SAS drifts on southern routes, where Lisbon or Casablanca is a far better-placed connecting hub than Copenhagen — four of its five worst rows run to Rome or Lisbon, and Royal Air Maroc takes two of them. North or into the middle of Europe, SAS is competitive nearly everywhere. To the Mediterranean it is routing you the long way round, and pricing accordingly.

The top of the table, and how each carrier gets there

Carrier	Aircraft	Seat	Value	Product
Lufthansa	A350-900 / 787-9 (Allegris)	10/10	8/10	9.0
TAP Air Portugal	A330-900neo	8/10	10/10	9.0
SAS	A330-300 / A350-900	8/10	9/10	8.8
Iberia	A350 Next	10/10	6/10	8.5
British Airways	Club Suite	10/10	5/10	8.3

SAS now stands alone in third. Finnair matched it on all four dimensions when both were thinly priced; at 97 routes against Finnair's 21, SAS's $20 premium is the more established number and Finnair has settled at $98.

TAP is the carrier that took the top spot from this one. Same seat score, better fare — a $0 median premium against SAS's $20, and 41 outright wins to SAS's 36. The choice between them is which hub is on your way, and our southern-route data says Lisbon wins more of those than Copenhagen does.

Lufthansa is the other 9.0 and reaches it from the opposite end: a perfect 10 on seat with the Allegris door SAS lacks, at a $69 median premium against SAS's $20. Buy the door there, not here.

An earlier version of this page had SAS at 9.0 in a three-way tie. Growing the fare grid — first to 59 routes, then to 193 — settled it at 8.8. The cabin never changed; the comparison set did, twice.

No aircraft lottery, which is rarer than it should be

Both long-haul types we verified — the A330-300 and the A350-900 — run the same cabin. Same layout, same lie-flat, same direct aisle access.

That sounds like a small thing and it is not. Seven of the fifteen carriers we score fly materially different cabins on different aircraft at the same fare: British Airways ranges from 10 on seat down to 5, KLM from 10 down to 5, Lufthansa from 10 to 5. On those airlines, checking the equipment on your specific date is the single highest-value thing you can do before booking.

On SAS it changes nothing. You get what you booked.

Everything goes through Copenhagen

Ninety-four of the 97 SAS fares in our grid route via Copenhagen. The three exceptions are the Copenhagen nonstops themselves, from New York, Boston and Chicago.

That is not incidental, it is the entire reason the fares look like this. SAS sells connecting traffic through its hub, so its alternative to selling you a cheap seat is flying it empty. It is also why SAS holds its own hub from New York and loses it from Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles: on the one pair where no rival connects to Copenhagen it is the cheapest way in, and on the three where Icelandair does, it is not.

The practical consequence: you are buying two sectors, not one. On a redeye that is a real cost, and it is the same trade the Reykjavik routing asks you to make. The difference is that SAS gives you a lie-flat bed at the end of it and Icelandair gives you a recliner.

The label on this review

Researched, not Flown. SAS is on the list of airlines Jon has flown, but the cabin was not recorded, and this project's rule is that an unconfirmed cabin means no first-person claim about the seat.

So nothing here describes what the seat felt like. Service, food and ground recovery are not scored at all, because those cannot be known without being on the aircraft — they appear only in reviews like the Azores Airlines one, where the exact flight can be named. What you are reading is verified product data and fares, which is a narrower claim and the reason to trust it.

Who should book it

• If your route is obscure, start here. SAS priced on 97 of our 193 routes, and where the cheaper specialists do not fly it is frequently the cheapest thing that does — 36 outright wins, second only to TAP.
• If you are going to the Nordics or central Europe, doubly so — the hub is on the way rather than a detour.
• If you are going to Italy, Portugal or Spain, price TAP or Royal Air Maroc first. Copenhagen is the wrong direction and the fares say so.
• If you need a nonstop, look elsewhere. Ninety-four of 97 fares connect.
• If a privacy door matters to you, the door is the one thing this cabin does not have, and Delta's A350 or KLM's 787 do.

Method

Product data verified August 30, 2026 against published seat maps and fleet pages, recorded per aircraft rather than per airline. Pitch and width are deliberately not recorded: published figures for the same seat disagree between sources, and layout and aisle access do not.

Fares come from the carrier grid — every airline priced for the same fixed travel week of November 8–14, 2026 — so a difference between two rows is the airline and not the dates. Value is computed from that grid: the cheapest carrier on a route scores 10, and the score falls as median premium rises.

Where to go from here

• The best airlines to Europe — all fifteen carriers on this rubric.
• KLM World Business Class — the exact inverse of this review.
• Connecting through Reykjavik — the other hub-and-spoke bargain, priced route by route.
• How we review — what Researched means and why only four dimensions are scored.