I'm not sure, but I suspect that's the case. I was on a DXB-SIN-DXB. They gave me a return ticket despite my VDBing on one leg only. So I suspect it's for an equivalent itinerary.

When this happened, I was Skywards, but had just started flying regularly with EK, so no status.

I think it depends on at what point they know they need to deny boarding to people. And then target single travelers, preferably flying only one leg. I remember there being a couple of girls complaining they'd come in from Australia and were flying on to BHX. They eventually didn't get VDBed.

But another guy was connecting to somewhere else and did get VDBed. I think it depends also on where you're connecting to. I was at check in a good 90-120 minutes before - the duty manager asked me to come back after an hour when I expressed interest in his offer. So I didn't turn up last minute. And I would have done the OLCI. Oh and I had a bulkhead aisle seat selected online.

Haha, SIN isn't interesting because I fly between DXB and SIN all the time anyway. There's nothing exciting about it. It's somewhere I'd pay to fly anyway. I personally wouldn't rank Singaporeans as the second coolest nationality though. Your link is strange, because it's the Tokyo page. Maybe Japanese find the people here fascinating.