Singapore Airlines is progressively blocking at least some KrisFlyer accounts with a zero current redeemable-mile balance from using the normal award-search engine. The error explicitly says the account’s “current miles balance is insufficient for flight redemption searches” and redirects users to Singapore’s much less useful beta Flight Recommender.
- Normal award search seems to require miles in your KrisFlyer account
- A transfer of 1,000 miles seems to be sufficient
- It’s unclear to me whether a smaller transfer is sufficient
There are reports suggesting ‘activity in the past 15 months’ is the rule but I can’t actually verify that this is the case. In fact, it seems to me that it isn’t from data points of members who had activity last week, now have a zero balance, and who are no longer able to search for award space. It doesn’t seem to (yet) affect everyone with a zero balance, however.
There’s nothing in the Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer terms and conditions about this – it appears to just be a new process that rolled out, without updating any FAQs or other guidance. And it looks like a looks like a staged deployment, where members have search access with no miles one day, and the limitation goes into effect the next.
Reports from Singapore Airlines chatbot customer service suggest that award search access can be restored by:
- Crediting an eligible paid Singapore, Scoot or partner flight.
- Points transfer from a credit card program
- Earning through a KrisFlyer partner.
You can still call for award availabiltiy, or use the AI recommender though that only returns broad date ranges and approximate Saver prices and not actually specific airline schedules. I’d note that Seats.Aero lists an ‘outage’ for Singapore Airlines award availability.
Checking award availability through Singapore itself matters because they release far more premium cabin award space to members using their own miles than they offer to members in partner airline programs (like United, Air Canada).
Years ago I wrote about how ordinary Miles & More members had to credit a flight before searching Lufthansa and SWISS space, while JetFriends child accounts could search without doing so. I even mailed off a parental consent form to give myself permission to particiate in JetFriends to unlock award search through the program. So Singapore is hardly the first airline ever to gate access to award availability to members with active accounts.
This is very different than Qatar Airways, which has its own new draconian restrictions on award redemptions but still allows award search. And EVA Air Infinity MileageLands hasn’t always shown award space to accounts with an insufficient balance.
Wow. They’re REALLY getting stingy. Hardly any non-Waitlist awards for long-haul J anymore anyway. Sad.
They have to make up for the billions lost on Air India somehow
Bit of a hot take, but I wish their transfer partners would gang up on them since this arguably threatens the value of those partners’ currency, and those transfers have got to be valuable for SQ.
@Gray — Eh, that more of a ‘room-temperature’ take. A ‘hot’ take would be to call out that airlines don’t actually want anyone to redeem points; they’d prefer to sell those points to banks, profit, and not have to serve anyone. They try to do this by devaluations and silly restrictions like this. By-design.
Just tried a Singapore award search (with zero miles balance), got the popup message “Unable to proceed because your current miles balance is insufficient…”. I transferred in 1,000 miles and *still* receiving the same message. Anybody else seeing the same thing?
Maybe it takes a bit for systems to sync, will try again later.
@Alex — Bah! They got you! Oof. Suckaaaa!!! /s (probably just a temporary glitch.)
1990. You desperately need to get a life.
You can bet UA, DL & AA will watch this and probably come up with something similar.
I’ve been chatting with an agent to uncover what is truly required to search. As you’d expect, they are giving the run around.
“To clarify, there is no specified minimum KrisFlyer miles balance required to search for reward flights. However, you will need sufficient miles in your account to redeem the lowest available award fare for your selected route and cabin class. Awards start from 16,500 KrisFlyer miles and from US$24 in taxes, charges and fees. We recommend referring to the KrisFlyer award chart or using the Miles Calculator to estimate the minimum miles needed for your preferred journey.”
I pressed them on this being a contradiction (no minimum vs. 16,500). They say that one does not require 16,500 to search, but would not give a specific number.
Qatar Avios you can search for available awards but it will not let you see online the taxes/surcharges without having the full required points balance for the booking already in the account!
I don’t get this. What abuse, loophole or disadvantage is Singapore trying to fix here? Obviously intentional–but why do it? What do you all speculate?
@1990’s Life Coach — You first.
@Owings — Speculation? You came to the right place! Block award-scraping bots that crash their servers; trap 1,000 of your bank points into non-refundable KrisFlyer miles, just so you can look; keep brokers off their J/F space; profit off the breakage when those stranded miles expire.