KrisFlyer News Singapore Airlines

Singapore Airlines improves calendar award searching, including partners

You can now quickly scan through several weeks of KrisFlyer award space, including for Star Alliance and partner airlines

Search

Note: Improved calendar award searching is now also available on the SingaporeAir mobile app.

Back in January 2019, Singapore Airlines launched a much needed seven day award search functionality to its KrisFlyer search function, allowing you to scan availability within three days either side of a specific date. Well, that was the theory.

In practice it was a little clunky. It wouldn’t allow you to continue to scroll through date ranges, for example, if there was no availability at both Saver and Advantage levels in a specific search week, and for the mobile app it was limited to a three-day search window (i.e. +/- 1 day).

No flights
The previous version of seven-day award searching wasn’t always very helpful
ADVERTISEMENT

What’s changed?

When running some award searches this morning for a trip next year, we noticed the site has a fresh new look in this area. It’s not just aesthetics though, the airline has rolled out an enhanced search function on its KrisFlyer website.

Search

There is now no need to select the ‘Flexible travel dates’ option when making an award search, as the site will now search and show awards within +/- 3 days of your selected travel date by default.

Before if there was no award space available at Saver or Advantage levels across your date range you were either shown availability for a different class instead (e.g. Business rather than First, not very helpful), or were ‘locked’ from proceeding to the previous / next seven-day period. The website does now allow this.

NRT Zero
No award availability? No problem. The site now allows you to quickly skip to the next week, and the next week…

For example when searching a specific date for a First / Suites redemption to Tokyo, you can now quickly scan through to find the next available award week-by-week, without being ‘stuck’ having to make another search, or being presented with the Business Class options instead (the app still does this, annoyingly).

NRT Success
Voila! Skipping by one week starts to give you options on this route

This is a significantly easier and less frustrating way to scan through award space on a route than before, plus it’s noticeably faster. Searching through a whole month took us less than 30 seconds.

App 3-day F to J
The app won’t help unfortunately, ‘downgrading’ the search to Business Class in this case

Unfortunately the mobile app has not been updated at this stage, so let’s hope for an improvement in that department.

ADVERTISEMENT

Displayed miles rates prioritise available awards

One quirk of the new system that’s important to understand is that the ‘headline rate’ is always the cheapest (lowest miles) immediately confirmable award rate on that particular date (Saver or Advantage).

That means waitlist awards might be hidden until you click on the specific date.

WL Hidden
In this example, the lowest immediately confirmable (Advantage) award rate is shown, but there is the opportunity to waitlist at a Saver rate

If there are no immediately confirmable awards on the date displayed in the search bar (e.g. both Saver and Advantage awards are waitlisted), the lowest available waitlist rate will be shown. That’s the case on Sunday 3rd January in the above example.

It now works for Star Alliance and partners

When the seven-day award search functionality first rolled out, it was only applicable to Singapore Airlines and SilkAir awards.

Unfortunately this remains an issue with the mobile app, which will hopefully be updated later, however the website does now support seven-day award searching for these Star Alliance and partner airline redemptions too.

For example, it’s easy to scan through a whole week’s availability on Virgin Australia using the website.

VA Search

If the date you want is not available, simply scan to the following week or previous week and it loads the dates fairly quickly, as with SIA award space.

ADVERTISEMENT

Summary

We found that whether searching Singapore Airlines or Star Alliance / Partner awards using the newly enhanced website, it was quick to scan through week-by-week and see the relevant award space for that new period load within seconds.

The interface now also has a much ‘fresher’ look in our opinion.

2013 F Middle Seats (MM)
Searching those elusive First Class or Suites awards is now easier thanks to the upgraded SingaporeAir website. (Photo: MainlyMiles)

In fact it wouldn’t take you long to scan through a whole year’s award availability this way – useful for Suites and even some Business redemptions on popular routes (e.g. finding two First Class Saver awards on the same London flight).

Ultimately what we wanted when this function was first rolled out over a year ago was to view award availability for a whole week, and happily click away at the ‘Next 7 days’ button to scan easily and quickly through a wide date range on a specific route. Star Alliance and partner awards were also on the wish list!

Well our wish has been granted with this welcome enhancement from Singapore Airlines. Let’s hope they can roll out something similar for the mobile app in due course, as it would be great to also have this search flexibility ‘on the move’.

You can try out the new function at singaporeair.com. Let us know your experience in the comments section below, including if you notice any other quirks or ways to make searching easier.

ADVERTISEMENT

19 comments

    1. Ha yes it will be nice to scan through the F and R saver awards to these places again without wondering whether the flight will even take place!

  1. I still get the old (appalling) search pages whatever routes and dates try. I even tried your example routes and dates with no luck.

    1. That’s weird. Works for me on Safari, Google Chrome and Firefox. Apple Mac here.

      Are you sure you’re not accessing a mobile site or using a mobile device?

      1. That’s strange. Still works for me using a UK VPN. Thanks for highlighting but I can’t help sorry!

      2. Need set country to SG. Somehow, mine was set to Spain and I could not see the new search. Changed to SG, the new search came out.

  2. Don’t trust the calendar 100%. I have now seen cases where awards are available in the day, but it showed not available in calendar. You have to use the exact date to show it.

    1. Yes there is also the issue of some phantom availability in the calendar, especially for Star Alliance / Partners.

      This has been an issue since they rolled out the calendar award view unfortunately.

  3. I live in Australia, and cannot access the new search; even after changing settings to ‘Singapore’! Seriously crappy website IMHO.

  4. thanks Andrew, I cleared cache and cookies before re-setting to Singapore. Nothing. Infact, the website is refusing to let me ‘redeem’ tickets … no results, riverts to to main home page.

  5. HI there, are there any readers stationed overseas and not in Singapore, who have problems trying to do investigate redemption ticket opportunities? I certainly hope that I am not the only one with issues. i have problem doing ‘redemption’ on all browsers, including Chrome, I/E, and on android and iphones too!! Yes, i have cleared all cache etc …. ‘buying’ commercial tickets work for me, only ‘redemption’ does not …. Thank you, Chris

Leave a Reply