After my holiday to the maldives this summer I needed a way of getting to tokyo and also stopping over in bangkok. My first idea was to catch a cheap flight to colombo and then book CMB-BKK-SIN-NRT. I was told this wasnt a valid routing so rang again and got a different agent. She gave me the same answer and put me through to a supervisor and again he said it was not allowed. I was offered the alternative of CMB-SIN-BKK-NRT on all 3 occasions . I didn't want to fly this route as I wanted SQ F so I asked for CMB-BKK open-jaw SIN-NRT ... believe it or not this was not allowed either! I tried reasoning and explaining how many miles shorter this route was than their proposed route but no luck
Anyway I realised it would be easier to just go ahead and book MLE-SIN-NRT so I gave them a ring today. Agent told me I was not allowed a stopover in SIN as this was not the most direct route to which I asked him what the hell the most direct route was then?? ''It is the most direct route available but you can still not stop over in SIN'' . I was thinking 'this guy must be taking the p**s!!
Finally I rang up and spoke to a nice lady who did everything in about 8 minutes!
Cannot believe what I was put through for this booking considering some of the other things people get by the ICC!
Anyway the final outcome is:

MLE-SIN (SQ C) -NRT (SQ F)

20,000 miles + £140 + £117 tax

Now let's see whether SQ11/12 goes 77W by August!