It’s 4 months since the botched introduction of online Star Alliance award tickets through the KrisFlyer portal. Having heralded the new feature as a great leap forward only a few weeks before, it basically only worked for two airlines on day one.
A week later, not much had changed, but a month later it was a different story. Finally the vast majority of Star Alliance award tickets and about half the partner award flights could be searched and booked online as intended (or expected at least) from the outset.
How does it look now?
On the whole not that much has changed in the last three months. In some ways things have become worse (Virgin America is gone), and in some ways we’ve found even more limitations than we were aware of before.
To show it as clearly as we can we’ve compiled a revised table showing the latest online search and booking functionality for Star Alliance and SIA partner airlines.
To create the table we needed to determine which awards were and weren’t showing. To do this we found at least two separate itineraries where we could find saver award space as offered to Star Alliance members (using the United MileagePlan site, or ‘KVS’ tool which largely uses the Air Canada Aeroplan database).
These are called ‘Star Awards’ and are collectively offered to the frequent flyers of all Star Alliance member carriers.
Here’s how the table works:
Yes | Fully searchable and bookable online |
Partial | Partial online functionality, see our notes after the table |
No | Not searchable or bookable online |
Star Alliance Airlines
Airline | 7 Dec 2017 |
14 Dec 2017 |
7 Jan 2018 |
9 Apr 2018 |
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No | No | Yes | Yes |
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No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
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No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
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No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
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No | No | No | No |
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Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial |
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No | No | Yes | Partial |
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No | No | No | No |
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No | No | Yes | Yes |
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No | No | Partial | Partial |
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No | No | Yes | Yes |
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No | No | Yes | Yes |
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No | No | Yes | Yes |
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No | No | Yes | Yes |
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No | No | Yes | Yes |
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No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
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No | No | Yes | Yes |