Southwest Florida's seasonal snowbirds rarely think of Gothenburg as their next European base, but Sweden's second city has quietly become one of the more rewarding premium redemptions out of RSW once you understand the routing math. There's no nonstop option here — business class from Fort Myers to Gothenburg always involves a transatlantic connection, typically through Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Munich, or Copenhagen — with total journey time landing around 12-14 hours including the layover, against a raw air time of roughly 9.5 hours for the long-haul segment. KLM routes through Amsterdam with its 787 or A330 business class cabins, Lufthansa connects via Frankfurt or Munich with widebody business seating (and increasingly its new Allegris cabin on select aircraft), and SAS offers arguably the most logical itinerary, funneling through Copenhagen on its A330 or A350 business class product before a short intra-Scandinavian hop up to Gothenburg.
My strong preference on this routing is SAS through Copenhagen: the connection is short, the SAS lounge in CPH is a genuinely relaxing place to decompress after a long transatlantic leg, and the final GOT segment, while operated in a narrowbody, rarely runs longer than 45 minutes. If you're routing through Frankfurt or Munich on Lufthansa instead, build in extra connection time during winter months, as Central European fog delays are common from November through February — not a factor if you're traveling in the sweet spot of May through September, which also happens to be when Gothenburg's archipelago and canal-side cafes are worth the trip. One insider trick: RSW's security lines swell dramatically on Sunday afternoons during peak snowbird season (January-April), so if your international connection routes through a US gateway first, arrive earlier than you'd expect.
Because this itinerary depends entirely on connection pricing rather than a single nonstop fare, values swing more than travelers expect based on which European gateway prices lowest that month. I'd treat this as a route where setting up automated fare alerts pays off — tracking Fort Myers to Gothenburg business class pricing across SK, LH, and KL simultaneously is the only way to reliably catch the dips before they disappear.
