Advertising Disclosure: Links and credit card offers on this page may earn us a small commission. They never influence what we cover but they do keep the lights on. Learn More
Last month, I wrote about the changes to the Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer program wherein you’d soon be able to book Star Alliance awards on the Singapore Airlines website, but in exchange, they raised the pricing on their Star Alliance awards and added phone booking fees for those that, well, want to use the phone to book.
The day of reckoning was to be today, December 7th (a day which has come and gone in Singapore by now).
📰 Want MilesTalk to show up in your Google News? (Yes, you do!).
👉 Click here to add MilesTalk as a trusted news source for all things related to miles, points, and credit card rewards in your Google searches!
I was excited to check out the Star Alliance booking process. But it seems that their efforts were not completed on time, and the booking engine is crazy buggy now. It seems that they programmed about half of it and launched it that way.
I was able to get a flight on Air New Zealand to show up. As you can see, for any route, you can now click to select if you want to search on SQ metal, or on a Star Alliance partner, or on a non-Star SQ partner.
But in several attempts to pull up partners, this was the only one I could find.
And here’s the really annoying part. When you pick a day that has no SQ and no Partner award availability, it just basically rejects your search and returns you to the homepage, where you’ll have to re-enter all of your search criteria. Annoying!
I really wish that Singapore Airlines would figure out a better error handling method (when search results are nil) than dumping you back at the homepage with no search criteria even saved. It makes using their site beyond cumbersome. What would be great would be a “no availability” page with either a calendar view or, at the least, a chance to easily just change the date and search again.
I also thought that this would be a great time to park some SQ miles for use on United’s transcontinental flights since a business class EWR-LAX flight is just 20,000 SQ miles compared to 32.500 United miles.
Well, United is the one leaving me in the cold there, as using the United award calendar I could not find a single transcon business class award on that route in all of 2018.
Long story short, SQ online partner awards are coming, but they are not fully here yet.
Hopefully, they can tidy up the less user-friendly features as they finish up the integration.
How do you feel about the changes to KrisFlyer partner award bookings? Let me know here, on Twitter, or in the private MilesTalk Facebook group.
