A week ago, Singapore Airlines increased the KrisFlyer mileage rates needed for many redemption flights with Star Alliance carriers.
At the same time, presumably as a way to placate us all, they started offering something we should always have had – Star Alliance and partner airline redemption searching and booking functionality online, not just through the call centre. Altogether, in typical Singapore Airlines IT style, it was totally botched.
SIA pleaded that they hadn’t ever intended to have the system fully functional on the launch date (7th December), and that these flights would be “progressively rolled out” to the online system.
Strange that they only admitted this halfway through the day, after several blogs had already stated it wasn’t working, and online forums were filling with frustrated comments from KrisFlyer members along the same lines.
So we decided to have another look, one week on from the ‘non-launch’, at what’s changed. In summary, the answer probably won’t surprise you: not a lot.
What’s always worked?
Since 7th December, these redemption searches and award bookings have always appeared on the KrisFlyer website.
Partner awards:
- Virgin America (VX)
- Virgin Australia (VA)
Star Alliance awards:
- Air New Zealand (NZ) (sort of, see below)
- Lufthansa (LH)
What’s been added?
It appears that the following Star Alliance carriers have had at least some or all of their award inventory added to the system in the last week:
- Aegean Airlines (A3)
- Air Canada (AC)
- Air China (CA)
- EVA Air (BR)
- Scandinavian SAS (SK)
- Swiss International Air Lines (LX)
- Turkish Airlines (TK)
What’s still missing?
Given that it’s now starting to get a bit complicated, we made a table of all the airlines you’re supposed to be able to perform online redemption searching and award booking with, and then listed whether you actually can or can’t currently do it. Can’t is the operative word, as you’ll see.
How we determined it
For four partner airlines, we checked random routings across several months where we would expect at least one award seat to come up as available. Trial and error, but better than nothing.
For all 27 Star Alliance airlines (yes, this took us a long time), we found at least two separate itineraries where we know award space was offered to Star Alliance members<