[RESOLVED] Singapore Airlines has stopped loading award seats at T-355 days

As most of our readers know, a good time to jump on freshly-loaded Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer award space each day is at 8am SGT, 355 days in advance of your intended travel date, which is when the airline first loads flights into the reservation system.

This can be a great strategy to score a pair of Saver Business Class award seats even on some of the most popular routes, like Singapore to London or non-stop to New York.

There are some slightly different timings you’ll need to be aware of to be the first in line for award seats originating in the USA, as we outlined in our full article here, but generally speaking its 8am Singapore Time for pretty much all flights across the network.

The usual T-355 days timing

Here’s how the usual award opening time window looks, depending on your departure city.

KrisFlyer ‘fresh’ award space timings
(355 days before departure)

Departing from:
Singapore and non-US cities	New York (EWR/JFK)	Houston (IAH)	US West Coast (LAX/SEA/SFO)
8am SGT (00:00 GMT)	12pm SGT (00:00 ET)	1pm SGT (00:00 CT)	3pm SGT (00:00 PT)

If you’re not too adept at deducting 355 days from a particular date to determine when the new award space will come online for your desired flight, especially with a leap year in play like in 2024, don’t worry – we’ve got a handy calculator below for you to use.

For example, if your desired flight is departing out of Los Angeles on 20th November 2024, you’ll need to be online to book on 1st December 2023 at 3pm Singapore Time to get access to the first release of both revenue and award seats.

This strategy does not work right now

Pretty much every year around this time in November, and at a similar point in April too, we get messages from shocked readers telling us that Singapore Airlines has loaded no new award space at the T-355 days mark.

Don’t panic.

SIA hasn’t suddenly decided to be stingy with award seats or change its policy, this actually happens twice per year when the T-355 days mark catches up with the IATA schedule season changeover.

• IATA summer schedule
  Starts on the last Sunday of March and ends on the last Saturday of October the same year
• IATA winter schedule
  Starts on the last Sunday of October and ends on the last Saturday of March the following year

These seasons tie in with schedule changes, the coordination of takeoff and landing slots at many airports, and when much of the world changes its clocks due to daylight saving.

The bookend that’s causing the current pause in new award seats being loaded is the summer 2024 season, which ends on 26th October 2024.

Singapore Airlines simply hasn’t started loading any flights for the northern winter 2024 / 25 season yet, which runs from 27th October 2024 to 29th March 2025.

This doesn’t just apply to award seats, you can’t even book a revenue (cash) fare from 27th October 2024 onwards with Singapore Airlines, and probably won’t be able to for a little while.

Your booking window is now effectively being limited by the schedule loading, not by T-355 days.

This is frustrating if you’re looking to jump on an award at T-355 that sits towards the start of the IATA season, since you don’t know exactly when it will be loaded, and therefore when to get online to book!

What happens next and when?

Singapore Airlines does not stick to a specific date when it comes to loading the next season’s schedule into the reservation system, so we can’t say for sure when the winter 2024 / 25 flights will appear.

Once it happens though, there’s a sudden ‘catch-up’ to the T-355 day mark, and the revenue and award space that hasn’t been loaded on a daily basis in the meantime gets dumped into the system all at once.

Furthermore, 8am is not necessarily the time of day the airline will do this, our understanding is that it could happen at any time of day. Once SIA is happy with it – someone just presses a button I guess!

Last year, this happened on 23rd November – apparently during mid-afternoon Singapore Time. That doesn’t mean it will be exactly the same this year, it could be sooner or later than that.

The key here is to monitor it on a regular basis. Once the schedule is loaded, the same generous award space that would have been initially loaded each day should be available to book for all the dates that have been ‘missing’ in the meantime.

We’ll update our Facebook and Telegram pages once the bookable schedule catches up to T-355 days this year, so be sure to follow us there to help you be first in line for the all-important award search, if this issue affects you.

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Jumping on KrisFlyer award space for Singapore Airlines flights as soon as it’s loaded is a great strategy for getting ahead of the pack, provided of course that you can make travel plans well in advance, or accept the change or cancellation fee if it turns out the flight no longer works for you.

However, at this time of year and also in early April each year, the schedule loading doesn’t keep up with the T-355 days mark, so you become limited by the end date of next season’s flights instead, while SIA works to finalise at least an initial plan for the subsequent IATA timetable period.

While that’s frustrating if you were planning to use this tactic to score award seats in late October or early November next year, the only thing you really need to do now is keep checking until the flights suddenly appear all at once (just search regular fares if it’s quicker, since revenue and award space all gets loaded together).

You should then be able to access the usual generous T-355 award space for the two weeks or so of flights that get added in one fell swoop.

(Cover Photo: The Points Guy)

See also:

When does SIA first open award seats? READ OUR GUIDE

When does SIA first open award seats? READ OUR GUIDE