Pamela Wade flies from Copenhagen to London on Scandinavian Airlines
The plane: Airbus A320 with 30 rows of 3x3 seating, one class, tidy but no frills — a workhorse.
My seat: 26B — happily on the left side, best for the views, starting with gorgeous Copenhagen, crossing the Jutland Peninsula to follow the Dutch coast and finishing with London’s amazing sprawl and a close-up of Windsor Castle just before landing at Heathrow.
Price: $548.
Flight time: Ninety minutes — coincidentally, exactly the same time it took in immigration queue at Heathrow. I learned too late I could have skipped through in two minutes on the coat-tails of my British husband.
Fellow passengers: This flight was at the start of the Danish summer school holidays, so there were plenty of local young families heading away, as well as Brits returning home and in-transit foreigners like me.
How full: No spare seats.
Entertainment: Not even a sign of a screen. There is complimentary Wi-Fi for Skypoints members’ devices, but it costs $11 for everyone else. But the views from the window were entertainment enough. Food and drink: Tea and coffee are complimentary but you pay for everything else — $23 for a sandwich and a beer, nearly $7 for a bag of crisps. Nothing in Scandinavia is cheap.
Service: Efficient, but not especially friendly, and when I missed the handing out of landing cards and asked for one, one cabin attendant immediately said they were all gone. Her more helpful colleague fetched one for me.
Luggage: One 23kg bag included in the fare.
Airport experience: Copenhagen airport is confusing. Passport control is hidden beyond a mass of shops, well past the very strict security. There are few places to sit, unless you have lots of kroner to spend at an eatery. There were no verbal or digital announcements at the gate, where it seemed telepathy was the chief means of communication: suddenly everyone surged to the door, then stopped, then surged again. There were no staff visible. And then the plane was loaded from both ends at once, meaning there was a bun-fight in the aisle in the middle of the plane.
Fly again? Only because Copenhagen’s a lovely city.