Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer - How easy is it to redeem United miles for SQ first class seats?

I'm cross-posting this on the Singapore board because I know that you have the most experience and knowledge dealing with redemption of miles on SQ.

I am a United 1K and I was hoping to take my wife on vacation next year to Thailand. It has been a long-held dream of mine to fly on Singapore Airlines in first class. Given that I'll never pay for these seats, I was going to use a ton of United miles to get free seats. But I'm having a lot of trouble. I call United's International Mileage Plus folks and they enter one itinerary at a time and send it electronically to Singapore Airlines. Each time, the LAX-SIN/SIN-LAX portion or SFO-SIN/SIN-SFO portion is denied. After dealing with a couple very long phone calls, I decided to walk over to the Singapore Airlines ticket office here in Chicago. I got them to give me dates when there is availability using "O" tickets -- first class award tickets. The problem is that "availability" means there are tickets available but not necessarily using United miles. They may only be available using Singapore miles, or Lufthansa miles or SAS miles, etc.

So here's my bottom line question: What is the best strategy toward getting Singapore first class awards seats? Thanks for your help in advance.

I already answered in the UA forum, but the thought just ocurred to me that *A is supposed to come out with * awards of some sort in the near future. Have you inquired about that? If they do start to unify the awards around the entire system, maybe you can do a mix of carriers and that way at least get some part of your itinerary on SQ.

Also, out of curiosity, what does an SQ F award cost when denominated in UA miles?

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Gaucho100K

I'm not sure my comments will pertain to using UA miles. I recently completed a trip to BKK in SQ in F using 130,000 DL miles. My trip was on 10/4 which I had booked at the very end of August. However, I only took one seat. I've heard that it is next to impossible to get two award seats since F in SQ is only 12 seats. Hope this helps.

A First Class award ticket from LAX to BKK on SQ will cost a cool 180,000 miles. (gosh!)

A First Class award ticket from LAX to BKK on NH will cost a mere (?!) 130,000 miles.

I am sure that NH has more seats open for awards in F than SQ, not starting another debate on "SQ Arrogance" or anything. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

Although I have been on neither airlines' First Classes, various FTers' experience shows that ANA's offering is on par with, if not better, than SQ's.

So, for the price of 2 SQ tickets, you can redeem 2 ANA tickets and take yourself to Germany on Lufthansa in First Class... I will leave it up to you to decide which is better. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/biggrin.gif http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/biggrin.gif

Here's a thread on the ANA forum about the quality of their First Class (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum10/HTML/000068.html)


[This message has been edited by stargold (edited 10-27-2001).]