After 285 Mainly Miles articles, over a million page views and half a million site visits, 2018 is drawing to a close. This was our first full year of running the site and thankfully there was a fair share of Singapore Airlines news, a raft of miles-earning opportunities and plenty of credit card offers to keep us going.
That’s not to mention all our travel in 2018, including five Singapore Airlines reviews, four reviews on other airlines including Qantas First, Emirates new First and Qatar Qsuites, several lounge and hotel reviews and aviation news from Star Alliance airlines and others of interest to our readers in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.
Most of all we’ve been buoyed by the supportive comments we’ve received from our readers this year. We write about what we’re passionate about, and we’re pleased it hits the spot with so many of you. Thank you for your support this year and in the years ahead.
Here’s our year in review: 2018.
New planes
2018 saw a number of new aircraft in the Singapore Airlines fleet:
- Boeing 787-10
- Airbus A350 ULR
- Airbus A350 Regional
See our latest December fleet guide for all the details of the current SIA fleet. Meanwhile if the three different Singapore Airlines variants of the Airbus A350 are starting to confuse you, we recently wrote a detailed guide to help out with that.
New seats
New planes meant new seats this year too. The 2018 Regional Business Class seat was introduced on the 787-10, and later on the A350 Regional, while down the back of the A350 ULR an enhanced 2018 Premium Economy seat made its debut.
Disappointingly the Singapore Airlines 2017 Business Class seat, as fitted on the newest A380s, didn’t make its way onto the A350 ULR aircraft.
New routes
Singapore Airlines mostly reinstated old routes this year with the advent of the A350 ULR, restarting non-stop flights to Newark and Los Angeles. Seattle was announced as the fourth non-stop city in the USA for the airline, which is set to be serviced by the regular A350 from September 2019.
Elsewhere on the Star Alliance network from Singapore some new redemption opportunities popped up from LOT Polish, operating a Boeing 787 to and from Warsaw, and Lufthansa, reinstating a long-forgotten Munich route, this time with an Airbus A350 rather than the A340 used previously.
New hotels
With the long-awaited re-opening of Raffles postponed until 2019, very few new hotels opened their doors this year in Singapore.
We took the opportunity to review the excellent Six Senses Duxton a few days after it opened in April. Just this month the group has opened a sister property, Six Senses Maxwell, which we hope to review soon.
Otherwise this year we played catch up with our stays at the Aerotel Changi Airport (opened in February 2016) and the Andaz Singapore (opened in November 2017).
Across the water in Bintan we were wowed by the nearly four-year old Sanchaya, and we long to return as soon as our bank balance allows!
Elsewhere in Singapore there was a new opening at The Capitol Kempinski in September, which we’ll aim to try in 2019.
Aside from the re-opening of Raffles, 2019 should see the new Capri by Fraser at China Square and Dusit Thani Laguna properties open. The launch of the JEWEL at Changi airport should also see the opening of Singapore’s second YOTEL.
The long-rumoured merger
2018 was finally the year Singapore Airlines announced it was merging its regional subsidiary SilkAir into the mainline operation.
The big news was that flat-bed Business Class seats will be installed in the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft (the only ones transferring to SIA as part of the merger), and seat-back IFE will be installed throughout the cabin.
As part of the process lots of Boeing 737-800s SilkAir currently operates will be transferred to low-cost SIA subsidiary Scoot, as will over a third of its routes, in advance of full integration in 2020, when the SilkAir brand will finally disappear.
Credit cards
If 2018 proved one thing when it comes to miles earning credit cards in Singapore it’s that almost anything is possible.
If you’d said to us this time last year that:
- by April we’d be earning 8 miles per dollar for 3 months on all Apple Pay transactions using our Citi credit cards,
- in June Citi would slash the annual income requirement for their popular PremierMiles card to 30k,
- by July a brand new card would be launched offering 2 miles per dollar locally and 5 miles per dollar overseas on all spending with no minimum and no cap,
- by August a mid-range card would offer 4.2 miles per dollar on dining, 3 miles per dollar on overseas spend and 1.4 miles per dollar locally for 2 months, only to repeat the offer again in November and December.
we’d probably have said you were mad. That summary though represents the highlights of ‘the year that was’ for the miles-earning credit card market in Singapore during 2018.
Highlights from the year, month by month
Grab a coffee, or your beverage of choice, and maybe some popcorn! Here’s a trip down memory lane to reminisce over what was reported in the Mainly Miles world during 2018.
January 2018
- The year kicked off with Singapore Airlines announcing it was adding a credit card surcharge to bookings. After some confusion it transpired it only affected those booking the cheapest Economy Class tickets. Nonetheless the backlash led SIA to u-turn on the proposal after just one day.
- That same evening I took the brand new Singapore Airlines A380 Business Class flight down to Sydney, just 11 hours after my waitlist cleared, for one of our most anticipated reviews of the year.
- By mid-month Singapore Airlines announced that London and Hong Kong would be the next two routes to be served by the newly configured aircraft. 10 days later we exclusively revealed that Shanghai and Zurich would be next (they were).
February 2018
- February started with the news that one of SIA’s oldest seat types, the ‘Spacebed’, was officially dead with the last aircraft fitted with those seats retired from service.
- The first routes for the new Boeing 787-10 were revealed as Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur for crew training (though the former went on to become permanent), followed by Osaka for the ‘official launch’. Two weeks later it was announced that Perth would join the 787 fold too. Today 11 cities are on the 787 roster.
- Singapore Airlines offered a 50% discount on redemption tickets during March to and from Bali in Economy Class and Business Class. One of the biggest discounts seen in the ‘Spontaneous Escapes’ series, a similar offer was repeated for SilkAir flights in September and October, allowing you to fly from Singapore to Japan for just 12,500 KrisFlyer miles.
- We were the first to reveal the new seating layout of the upcoming Singapore Airlines Boeing 787-10 planes with alternating ‘couple’ and ‘divorce’ seats in the middle pairs. We went as far as producing a predicted seat map, which came eerily true just a month later.
March 2018
- March started with some rare good news for KrisFlyer members, the ticket fees hike for KrisFlyer redemption bookings was to be postponed for 2 months. Far from being from the goodness of their heart though, SIA coughed up and admitted they just couldn’t get it to work in time.
- For much of the next 11 days, miles addicts flocked to IKEA to take advantage of OCBC’s offer of 12 miles per dollar spent using their Titanium Rewards card.
- Another old Singapore Airlines Business Class seat bit the dust – the ‘Ultimo’ blue recliners bowed out on the daily Bangkok run to make way for an A330.
- Later in the month Mileslife said they’d give us at least 500 miles a year (10 per week) just for logging on to their app every day. The promotion continues, though they quietly cut the minimum to 1 mile per week in November meaning you theoretically could now earn as little as 50 miles per year from this promotion.
- The crescendo for March was the much-anticipated delivery of 9V-SCA, the first Singapore Airlines Boeing 787-10 (and the first commercial 787-10 in the world for that matter). We covered the news and photos from the delivery day.
April 2018
- We joined the inaugural commercial flight of the Singapore Airlines 787-10 (and the first commercial passenger flight of any 787-10 worldwide) between Singapore and Bangkok. By the same evening we’d published one of the first passenger reviews of the new Regional Business Class seat.
- Never ones to do things by halves, the next day we took the same plane back to Singapore to focus on the middle ‘couple’ pairs at the bulkhead row for another detailed review.
- Later in the month a major bank and credit card issuer lost its mind slightly and decided to give us up to 8 miles per dollar on any Apple Pay transactions for 3 months, with no cap. Citi probably didn’t realise you could Apple Pay two Emirates First Class tickets for S$11,000 and earn enough miles for a Business Class redemption from Singapore to Europe in the process, which is exactly what Eddie did!
May 2018
- Singapore Airlines proved the doomsayers of the ‘transformation plan’ wrong by announcing a S$893m annual profit. The next day they confirmed that SilkAir was to be merged into the mainline operation, something we predicted 5 months earlier (to the day).