SAS added that more people were choosing to reserve seats in advance.

 

"We had an eventful 2014, with more passengers on board and also a higher proportion of seats being booked across nine consecutive months," Gustafson said.

 

But the figures showed that fewer people were choosing SAS for intercontinental flights, with passenger numbers down 3.8 percent on 2013.

 

SAS has come under increasing pressure in recent years from low-cost rivals including Ryanair, which announced a new Copenhagen base, and the Oslo-based Norwegian, Europe's third-largest budget airline.

 

The competition led to a sharp fall in net profits last year.

 

"We have had a great growth internationally in the other months in 2014 so it is not a trend that fewer people are travelling with intercontinental routes," Henrik Edström, Media Officer for SAS, told The Local's team in Stockholm.

 

However he accepted that there was "ongoing price pressure on the market" and said that the company was working hard to cut costs.

 

The company announced a "final call" recovery plan in November 2012 which included job cuts and salary reductions and further savings worth 1.6 billion kroner were revealed in December.

 

This summer, the company is launching nine new routes to popular package holiday destinations and European cities. For example, passengers will be able to fly direct between Copenhagen and the cities of Edinburgh and Ankara; between Stockholm and Ankara, Budapest or Faro, between Oslo and Salzburg and between Gothenburg and Alanya, Dublin and Bergen.

 

SAS is fifty percent owned by the Danish, Swedish and Norwegian states.