Singapore Airlines improves calendar award searching, including partners

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).

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.