Historically, it’s been pretty easy to perform award searches with Singapore Airlines. All you needed was to be logged into a free-to-create Krisflyer account and you could run as many searches as you wanted to your heart’s content.
Singapore Airlines has sadly added an irksome new requirement—a balance of at least 1,000 Krisflyer miles.
If you currently have a zero balance in your Krisflyer account (or a nominal number of miles that are fewer than 1,000), when trying to perform an award search you’ll see the following message:
Unable to proceed because your current miles balance is insufficient for flight redemption searches. To view available flights and the miles required, browse flight options.
What’s disappointing for your average person is that Singapore Airlines doesn’t state how many miles are needed in order to run searches. Thankfully it turns out that the requirements aren’t too stringent as this Reddit commenter confirmed that transferring in 1,000 American Express Membership Rewards reinstated the ability to perform award searches, even though 1,000 miles wouldn’t be sufficient to actually book any flights with miles.
Singapore Airlines is a 1:1 transfer partner of Amex Membership Rewards, Chase Ultimate Rewards, Citi ThankYou, and Capital One miles, so there are plenty of transferable currency options you can choose from. Still, it’s not ideal because it means that if you ultimately don’t book with Singapore, you’ve got 1,000 orphaned miles. Singapore Airlines also has a fairly strict expiration policy for Krisflyer miles: they expire after 36 months regardless of any other activity. Ultimately, potentially losing 1,000 miles every three years in order to maintain the ability to run searches on Singapore’s website isn’t hugely costly, but it’s frustrating nonetheless. If every airline loyalty program decided to do something similar, the costs would soon mount up.
If you get the popup shown earlier that states you don’t have sufficient miles, it provides a link to this page. That page seems to provide the ability to run AI-driven flight searches. I decided to test it out by checking award availability from New York to Singapore Airlines in business class (it initially defaulted to searching flights from San Francisco).
If you don’t want to have to transfer 1,000 miles to check award availability, you’ll need to be as specific as possible on this screen. I did remember to specify that I wanted the price in miles rather than cash, but I neglected to include a date. It therefore displayed availability across a range of dates in August.
I decided to refine the search by asking for tickets on September 16. I forgot to save the screenshot I initially took that showed pricing for dates on and/or around September 16, but when running the search again it showed me results for different dates than had been displayed previously, none of which were for the date I’d requested. Yet another example of AI reliability /s
I certainly wouldn’t want to rely on that AI-powered flight-finder before transferring over a large chunk of miles to make an award booking it claimed would be available, so I think the best bet for most people will be to either transfer 1,000 miles over themselves or hope that award booking search tools find a workaround for this requirement that doesn’t get their account shut down.
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I have exactly 1,000 pts. The other day when 1st announced, I could Not search.
I have 800 miles with SQ and reward flight searches are the same as usual for me on the app.
I have 1226 miles in my account. The other day when the news of this was first coming out I got the error message when I tried to search, but now I can search just fine. (Finding an affordable redemption is another story.)
I am able to search and see awards with just 274 miles in my account. So, there might be other things that satisfy the requirement to search awards. In my case, I had credited a roundtrip Singapore Airlines flight to them and earned 11k+ miles last year but used all but 274 of those miles for a United award earlier this year.
Maybe since you had a balance over 1k at some point, that satisfied the requirement to do the award searches.
Maybe its just nonzero-mile needed and you could do some creative crediting to your account to get it activated. Like a portal or something! Nick will figure it out!
This is a load of barnacles…
GET A LIFE! You spam every single blog. GET A LIFE!
Let’s all call their customer service line and ask them to check award pricing for us. Make sure to have a list of multiple dates/destinations for them to run
Brilliant way to detect the brokers, bots, etc.