Late last week, Air France-KLM Group and Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) announced that Air France-KLM is looking to increase its ownership stake in SAS Airlines from a current 19.9% stake to a controlling ownership stake of 60.5%. It sounds like this could happen as early as the second half of 2026, though time will tell whether this gets the necessary regulatory approvals.
Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) only joined SkyTeam during the second half of last year after Air France gained a stake in the airline and SAS left its place in Star Alliance. The airline’s loyalty program, SAS EuroBonus, made a huge splash last year with its EuroBonus Millionaire promotion, by which members registering for the promotion and flying 15 qualifying SkyTeam partners between October and December 31, 2024 earned 1,000,000 EuroBonus miles. We took that up as a Frequent Miler team challenge as Greg, Stephen, and I competed in Million Mile Madness.
Now it seems that Air France-KLM would like to greatly increase its ownership stake in the airline. One Mile at a Time reports that SAS would become a subsidiary of Air France-KLM and it sounds like Air France would integrate the loyalty program, making SAS part of the Flying Blue program.
If that happened, one would think SAS EuroBonus miles could become Air France-KLM Flying Blue miles at some point down the road. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of perspective. On the one hand, I was happy to have access to a different loyalty program with my SAS miles. On the other hand, I do find Flying Blue to often offer decent value. However, Flying Blue miles are notoriously more difficult to keep alive if you have credited paid flights to Flying Blue. I could see a double-edged sword developing where I’ll need to find a paid SkyTeam flight every so often in order to keep my boatload of miles alive.
That said, One Mile at a Time also points to the potential regulatory hurdles, which certainly may make this a longer and slower process or it could be blocked altogether. I personally wouldn’t be surprised if this doesn’t happen within the stated timeline, so I won’t be worrying much about this one way or another until far more progress is announced. Still, we’ll have to keep a close eye on how this develops over the coming year and what it means for those of us with a lot of EuroBonus miles.
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Apparently one of the legal agreements said that: “[SAS] shall facilitate a merger of the loyalty programs between SAS and Air France-KLM (Eurobonus/Flying Blue) at any time after Air France-KLM secures more than 50 percent of the outstanding shares.”
If this happens, it’s a win for anyone who did the SAS Challenge.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a quick merger of SAS into AF-KLM because I’m sure Denmark would rather have their ownership stake at the same parent level as France and the Netherlands, rather than at the SAS subsidiary level.
The press release stated company-wide integration including loyalty. It would seem that the answer is yes.