Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer Locks Down Award Flight Searches

Singapore Airlines is making it harder for bots to scrape its website for award seats, but the change also locks out humans looking to book flights using points.

While a KrisFlyer account has long been needed to hunt for award flights on the Singapore Airlines website, that account didn’t need to have any miles or any previous account history. Travellers could sign-up for free, and within minutes, begin searching for flights.

But now, and without notice, that’s changed. To search for award flights, KrisFlyer members need to have a sufficient balance of miles in their account. Anybody with an insufficient balance is blocked from searching – even those who’ve extensively earned and redeemed miles through KrisFlyer before.

As of this week, trying to search with fewer than 1,000 miles in the account produces a generic error: “your current mileage balance is insufficient for flight redemption searches.”

But it’s a developing situation. When the restriction first appeared, boosting your balance to at least 1,000 KrisFlyer miles was enough to unlock award seat searches. Now, this may no longer be enough, with some members reporting that they can’t perform searches, even with a 1,000+ balance. This suggests KrisFlyer has imposed some form of activity requirement before reward flight searching is enabled. Flight Hacks has contacted Singapore Airlines for more information.

Savvy frequent flyers who leverage flexible points transfer programs are the greatest impacted by this unexpected change.

A smart strategy has always been to hunt down a suitable reward flight before transferring miles from a partner program. For instance, those with American Express Membership Rewards points have many frequent flyer partners to choose from – KrisFlyer included. Confirming that there’s an award flight available, and how many miles it’d cost, allows the traveller to convert a precise number of points with confidence, ready to book.

Without knowing whether there’s a suitable award seat available, those with flexible points at their disposal have no incentive to transfer points to KrisFlyer.

What KrisFlyer Members Should Do Now

Right now, some members report that searching for award flights through Singapore Airlines’ mobile app is unaffected – or at least, still possible with a balance of at least 1,000 KrisFlyer miles. For other members with 1,000+ miles, the regular web search is working as usual.

Through the app, searches for all cabins, routes, and partner airline flights are available. You don’t need to have enough miles to cover your desired flight before you can search for it through the app.

For instance, with just 1,000 miles in my KrisFlyer account, I can still search for Singapore Airlines business class from Melbourne to Singapore well into next year.

If you’re looking to snag award flights through KrisFlyer, for now, try the app. If the app prevents the search due to having insufficient miles, it would appear that holding at least 1,000 miles can be enough to get around this – even if not for the main website.

To quickly get 1,000 KrisFlyer miles, you could transfer points from:

• American Express Membership Rewards: Minimum transfer of 7,500 MR points = 2,500 KrisFlyer miles.
• Amplify Rewards: Minimum transfer of 3,000 Amplify Points to 1,000 KrisFlyer miles.
• ANZ Rewards: Convert 3,000 ANZ Rewards Points into 1,000 KrisFlyer miles.
• HSBC Rewards Plus (Premier cardholders only): Minimum transfer of 5,000 Rewards Plus Points for 2,500 KrisFlyer miles.
• NAB Rewards: Minimum transfer of 3,000 NAB Rewards Points equals 1,000 KrisFlyer miles.
• Velocity Frequent Flyer: Minimum transfer of 5,000 Velocity Points for 3,226 KrisFlyer miles.
• Westpac Altitude Rewards: Minimum transfer of 3,000 Altitude Points to KrisFlyer for 1,000 KrisFlyer miles.

Summing Up

KrisFlyer has long leveraged its strength as a transferable points program. Members with flexible points quite rightly expect to be able to confirm where their points can take them before committing those points to one frequent flyer program.

There’d be nothing worse than transferring tens or hundreds of thousands of points to KrisFlyer, only to discover that KrisFlyer doesn’t have award seats to suit your plans – all while you could have made a different conversion.

If KrisFlyer locks this down further, members would be transferring while blind, crossing their fingers and hoping for the best, with no guarantee of being able to fly when and where suits them best.

We hope that Singapore Airlines can promptly clarify what’s needed to retain access to award flight searches. To pull the rug out beneath even long-time users of the program, and without notice, is incredibly poor.

If Singapore Airlines settles on a minimum balance of 1,000 miles to search, that’s manageable. But if they're moving to require at least enough miles in your account to cover the booking you hope to make, many travellers will quite rightly give KrisFlyer the flick. To transfer miles without knowing whether you can spend those miles reduces KrisFlyer’s appeal considerably.