Singapore Restricts Award Searches
Various points and miles blogs started reporting a frustrating new development yesterday. It appears that Singapore Airlines now requires you to have Krisflyer miles in your account in order to search for award flights. Our Facebook group members started reporting this yesterday as well, and now our team is seeing it too.
Error Message When Booking
Searches on the Singapore Airlines website start as normal. You log in, select “Redeem flights” at the top of the search box, input your airports, dates, passengers, class of service and then click “Search.” What happens next is the problem. If you do not have enough Krisflyer miles in your account you get this message:
Workaround Options
1. Flight Recommender
A new AI tool from Singapore called “Flight Recommender” finds flights based on your described parameters. This tool returns results for a variety of dates and classes of service. But if you click to view more details, the same error as before pops up if you lack the miles. Based on our test searches with members of our team, the results from this AI tool do show as bookable if you have sufficient miles in your account.
2. Search in the Singapore Airlines app
Searches in the Singapore Airlines app do not immediately result in an error when searching for one passenger. In fact, you can even get search results without having any miles in your account at all.
But when you try to search for more than 1 passenger and a lap infant, you get the same message as before.
3. Transfer points to Singapore Airlines (YMMV)
Singapore Airlines has 5 total transfer partners. Its four bank partners – American Express, Chase, Citi and Capital One – all transfer at a ratio of 1:1. But not all bank transfers are instant. Transfers from Chase take 1-3 days and transfers from Citi take approximately 12-24 hours. Transfers from Marriott Bonvoy are the least advantageous of all, with a transfer ratio of 3:1 and a transfer time of 48 hours.
Initial reports indicated that transferring a nominal amount of points to Singapore Airlines may result in the ability to conduct award searches. We tested this ourselves and unfortunately noticed no difference. On the website we still get the same error. And in the app we can still search for 1 passenger. One member of our team has over 4000 miles in his account and is able to search without receiving the error. Does this mean that there's a magic number that is more than 1,000 miles (the minimum transfer amount from most banks) but less than 5,000?
Singapore Restricts Award Searches: ToP Thoughts
The inability to search for award flights without meeting specific loyalty program criteria is a troubling trend in award travel. Our advice has always been to wait to transfer points until you can confirm availability. But if you can't search without miles in your account, that becomes a much harder proposition. We reached out to our contact at Singapore Airlines to see if we can get any further information about this development and how it impacts travelers. In the meantime, share your experience with us in the ToP Facebook group and let us know what you're seeing when you try to search.
