About ten seats per departure were sold at that price. The first services were from Stockholm to Alicante, Athens, Barcelona, Bologna, Budapest, Dublin, Istanbul, Málaga, Nice, Prague and Rome. From Copenhagen the airline's first flights were to Alicante, Athens, Bologna, Lisbon, Málaga, Palma de Mallorca, Pristina and Sarajevo. The latter two were particularly aimed at expatriates, rather than tourists. By May the airline had achieved a load factor of seventy percent, increasing to eighty-two percent by September. Snowflake then announced three new destinations from Stockholm from the start of the winter program in October: Lyon, Beograd and Beirut. The latter two were mainly aimed at expatriates. A new fare scheme was introduced from 1 October, whereby there were eight price levels, ranging from €58 to €228. It also started offering discounted booking fees for tickets bought online. In November Snowflake announced that it would end services to Dublin and Barcelona, citing low profitability. Scandinavian Airlines started to serving Dublin itself. Snowflake was hit by a strike within the SAS Group starting on 1 February 2004 amongst ground handlers. From February Snowflake introduced services from Stockholm to Bilbao and Olbia. Starting with the 2004 summer schedule, commencing 28 March, SAS introduced additional services. From Copenhagen the airline started flights to Ankara, Beirut, Skopje, Split and Valletta. From Stockholm services were introduced to Ankara, Inverness, Lisbon, Palma de Mallorca, Split, Skope and Valletta. At the same time two more aircraft, 156-seat McDonnell Douglas MD-82s, were introduced to the Snowflake fleet. In May 2004 the load factor drop to forty percent. Snowflake announced large cutbacks to the winter schedule, and planned to only operate four services: to Athens, Istanbul, Nice and Rome. This was down from thirteen during the previous winter season. With two flights each per week, this resulted in a very low fleet utilization rate. Snowflake had originally had success with their expatriate routes, but from 2004 passenger numbers fluctuated significantly on those routes. Similar cuts were carried out in Copenhagen: services were reduced to ten per week. This included the announcement of a new destination – Cairo. Two services, to Dublin and Prague, were taken over from Stockholm by Scandinavian Airlines. A further four destinations were cut with the winter program. All services to Spain were taken over by Spanair, which at the time was also owned by the SAS Group.