SAS to leave Star Alliance and plans to join Sky Team

SAS has struggling financially for over the years and it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July 2022. As part of the restructuring SAS has approved bid from consortium including Castlake L.P, Lind Invest ApS, Danish state and KLM-Air France to become the new owners of SAS.

SAS press release can be found from here

This means that SAS will leave from Star Alliance, on a date that it is not yet announced. As KLM-Air France is one of the new owners it will also join SkyTeam. This is fairly significant news SAS was one of the five original members of Star Alliance

Big loss for Star Alliance

This is a major blow for Star Alliance as SAS has been feeding traffic to Lufthansa. It will be interesting to see how Lufthansa will react on this and will it try to replace these lost connections with SAS with its on flights or one of the airlines from its group example. Eurowings.

I would not be surprised if SAS would start cutting flights to Germany when this deal has gone through, and we would most probably see more flights to Amsterdam and Paris.