Singapore Airlines has struggled with service to Houston since launching in summer 2008. Initially they operated one-stop from Houston to Moscow Domodedovo Airport to Singapore. In October 2016 that switched to Houston – Manchester, U.K. – Singapore. Loads were reportedly “seasonally abysmal.”
In addition to operating non-stop to Singapore from New York JFK, Newark, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, Singapore Airlines flies ‘fifth freedom routes’ from New York JFK to Frankfurt and Los Angeles to Tokyo Narita – along with Houston to Manchester. They used to operate San Francisco to Hong Kong and Seoul as well. Their other current routes continue.
Houston service suffered with decline in oil and gas markets, pushing the airline to switch it’s connecting city to Manchester – itself a limited direct market from Houston. Initially flown by a Boeing 777-300ER, this flight switched to an Airbus A350 in 2017.
Singapore Airlines has never benefited as much as it might have from its United Airlines partnership, which has often been frosty, and connections through Houston to one-stop service to Southeast Asia still means three flights before reaching a final destination beyond Singapore. Dallas has seen marginally more Asia flying in the meantime.
Singapore Airlines to drop its Manchester – Houston route from 1 April 2025
The airline will maintain 5x weekly flights between Singapore and Manchester, whist the Singapore – London Gatwick will increase to a daily flight pic.twitter.com/ceRIU5DbMo
— Sean M ✈ (@SeanM1997) August 12, 2024
The Singapore Airlines Houston – Manchester flight has long been amazing for award availability, though the connection from Manchester to Singapore has been tougher. It’s no surprise then that the Manchester – Singapore flight will continue, even as the transatlantic flight gets dropped.
Wow, who could have thought service between those cities would be so bad.
But if it was “abysmal” how did it survive for 20 years?
Anytime we lose a Singapore aircraft route that touches the USA, it’s a huge loss all around. 🙁
Surprised the route lasted as long as it did. Poor aircraft utilization and as the articles and analysis point out, demand quite soft. UA and SQ don’t cooperate and never have. SQ has no use for UA and doesn’t rely on connections in the US all that much to fill its JFK, EWR, LAX, SFO flights.
This just highlights the geographic advantage that Singapore has compared to most other major world cities.
The A350 can fly from any of the US NE or west coast cities to Asia with some payload restrictions but no other aircraft can fly from the interior US.
SQ serves the major SIN markets in the US.
They use their 5th freedom routes including this one to carry coach volume to SIN and were less interested in how much local IAH-SIN traffic they could fill.
As US-SIN nonstop capacity grows and as other carriers compete for connections via other hubs better, SQ’s ability to operate 5th freedom routes will deteriorate.
Being a fairly independent carrier in the US-SIN market from a cooperation standpoint doesn’t help.
I’d love to see a ORD-SIN route…
I meant to say “geographic disadvantage”
@Tim Dunn – geographic ADVANTAGE? Geographically SQ is at a disadvantage for US – Southeast relative to CX. Obviously changes outside the aviation landscape have affected Hong Kong over the past five years, but Cathay has been in a much better position to pick up connecting traffic than Singapore to many destinations.
New longer range aircraft making Singapore non-stops viable is a huge benefit to SQ. They no longer need flying gas can A340-500s to do it.
If SQ really wanted to stick it to UA, why not have a Hou-Los route?
@Tim Dunn – I see you added clarifying comment while I was typing the above !
Singapore Airlines is a good airline that I flew just after Covid-19 restrictions were loosened. The price was highly competitive at that time but the 12 hour plus layovers in Singapore were grueling. Leaving the airport was not recommended due to restrictions. Now they are not competitive at the lowest end of coach between LAX and PNH. They could probably pick up more customers at LAX with just adjusting the schedule so the long layovers were not there.
@jns it took me 30 seconds to search LAX-DPS on SQ and found a flight with a 4 hr layover. Try harder
Grabbed a Business Class award on this route during the Christmas holiday last year – indicates how readily available award seats were. I hope they ramp up some other US route to make up for this loss.
And yet the flight is still operating
Until the end of March? Madness
SQ should move the IAH flight to any number of big European hubs. DME & MAN were poor choices. I’d much rather take SQ to Europe than UA.
Hmmm/ How about SIN to LAS FTW (for the Wynn)
Delta could make nonstop IAH-SIN work!
Sadly SQ lacks a feeder airline in highly geographically-dispersed USA. Its interline agreement with competitor UA is suspended, and has only been able to get an interline agreement with JetBlue (which, astonishingly, *does not even include business class* and high-paying business class passengers are booked in economy) and Alaska, both regional players.
And it really doesn’t have any other options since DL would rather fly their traffic on partly-owned KE, and AA, a likely candidate as they’re starved for revenue, may be tied by its JBA with JL. And thanks to the hyper-consolidation of the US market there’s nobody left to do a deal with.
Sadly, all of this means than Americans are getting far less super-good Singapore Airlines flights than they otherwise would, and it’s mainly Californians and New Yorkers who benefit from SQ. Sad, really sad, for others, including Texans.
There is incorrect information from some of the posts above. See statement below from two years ago, when UAL and SIA began codesharing connecting flights on both sides of the pond. I did some sample searches on each of their websites, and they are definitely selling eachother’s tickets on those codeshares, complete with codeshare flight numbers.
“Passengers can now enjoy codeshare flights to 19 new diverse and fast-growing cities ideal for both business and leisure travelers alike, tapping Singapore Airlines’ and United Airlines’ industry-leading networks.
Beginning 26 April 2022, United’s customers will be able to connect to nine new codeshare destinations in the SIA Group network. Of these, seven points are in South East Asia. These are Brunei’s capital Bandar Seri Begawan, Siem Reap in Cambodia, Kuala Lumpur and Penang in Malaysia, and Denpasar (Bali), Jakarta and Surabaya in Indonesia. They may also connect to Perth in Australia, as well as Male in the Maldives with SIA.
SIA customers may connect on United’s flights out of Los Angeles to 10 new codeshare destinations in the US. These are Austin, Baltimore, Boise, Cleveland, Denver, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Reno, and Sacramento. This complements the existing connections available on United’s network from Houston to Atlanta, Austin, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Ft. Lauderdale, Miami, New Orleans, Orlando, and Tampa.”
Gary,
you really should be able to block addresses of people that copy user names that are already in use on your system.
And Delta has no interest in IAH-SIN.
SQ made money in the route. The revenue numbers have been posted on various forums. Load factors mean little. The flight sold heavily upfront and posted numbers showed revenue well over 50k$ per flight and often times plus 60k$.
The flight did well to Moscow too. Oil and gas O&D paid much upfront and Roscosmos had people on it several times a week as well (between NASA and Russian collaboration). The political situation and growing sanctions and restrictions caused the flight to be moved.
SQ has said publicly they are moving it to routes for summer Europe where they can make more money.
If the flight was as bad as people are saying they would not run it another 8 months.
@Gary – I got award tickets for 4 in business class in May from IAH to Asia on SQ. Any thoughts on how to approach them about reaccommodating us given that the Houston flight will not be operating?
@Christian – wait a week for them to remove the flight from the schedule. If you call now the agent may not realize that the flight has been cancelled, or they may not yet have sent a memo on reaccommodation. Be ready with the SQ flight you’d prefer to fly.
I am flying from Seattle to Manchester next week and really wanted to try the IAH-MAN route on Singapore as there are no nonstops to MAN from here anyway. As was pointed out, UA and SQ apparently don’t cooperate at all, even though they are both in Star Alliance. I have heard good things about SQ’s service but there was no way to book SEA-MAN via IAH on SQ–not via UA, SQ, or 3rd part sites–short of buying separate tickets, which I didn’t want to do (and which would have been very expensive). I am disappointed.
Just a data point here but SQ’s phone people are nice but it takes an incredibly long time to get anything done through them so I tried the Chat option in the website this time. The person I chatted with took under a half hour to rebook us out of New York on the nonstop to SIN even though there were no award seats available at any price. That would have been at least an hour by phone so maybe check into chat next time.