By the way, for your situation - I am not very familiar with good routes out of Portugal/Spain - but Norwegian's normal paid premium fares out of Oslo/Stockholm/London to Oakland have been a decent fallback for me for when I can't find a decent "hacked trip". It may work for you via a connection to/from e.g. London.

Pro:

- Decent almost business class for $1400 USD roundtrip

- You can buy single trips for 50% of the roundtrip cost

Con:

- Their irregular ops handling is disastrous. They use a small fleet of 787s for transatlantic flights, with zero spare capacity, so when a plane breaks somehow you basically have to wait for them to repair it. For that reason I avoid them on trips into the US (for planned meetings there) but sometimes use them on the way back.

Thanks! My regular route is Lisbon -> Amsterdam -> San Francisco with KLM. It's 5 am flight with a 50 minute connection in AMS, but Schiphol is a wonderful airport, the dutch very helpful, and I quite like the old airplanes they use on this route. I can usually find a ticket for $700, too.