Usually it’s been Europe that’s led the way when it comes to both equality and gay tourism marketing (all those country and city tourist boards putting out queer-targeted publications and web site content, for example). But on the airline side, North America’s taken the lead, especially carriers like Air Canada, American (probably the fag-friendliest of all), Delta, and Southwest.

But now, in another gay travel milestone of sort, the first European airline has joined this fag-and-dyke-friendly fraternity, and it’s not much of a surprise that it’s Scandinavian (aka SAS), a joint venture of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. On the other hand, the English-language version of FlySAS.com is a little cagey about its new gay section, frankly, there’s no labeled hyperlink listed in the “Promotions and Prices” section of which it’s part. It’s almost like they don’t want to be too obvious about it (the PR folks over there were keeping their lips zipped on this one).

But once you do get in, it’s pretty good stuff. Split into Copenhagen and Stockholm (why no Oslo, I wonder?), for each city it offers gay maps, events calendars, and downloadable PDF city guides that’re concise yet comprehensive – they even cover the friskier end of things, like saunas and sex clubs. One cute touch is a section of gay club picks from SAS crew like “Johan” and “Jonas” (oy – you mean to tell me some of their flight attendants are feygele?); no pictures of the boys, unfortunately.

We covered Oslo just the other week, and I’ll do the same for Copenhagen and Stockholm soon. But in the meantime, it’s nice to see SAS adding some sass, and that Europe’s new “open skies” are starting to openly include us homos.

Yours truly,
Dave

This entry was posted on 07.12.2008 at 12:34 pm by Dave and is filed under BabelBlog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.