Given the fact that time and again I see people complaining about how unfavourably SQ's ground service supposedly compares to the in-flight experience, I wanted to share with you today that my own impressions of the KF contact staff in particular have been nothing short of excellent! ^
I recently booked two different award flights in premium cabins for both myself and my wife, once using my KF miles and once hers. Both reservations were long haul saver awards with a built in stopover in Singapore, so stuff you cannot book yourself online.
On both occasions the agents immediately understood what I wanted, managed to execute my wishes while I was still on the phone and in short make me a very happy customer!
To give you an example, I had a booking for my wife ICN-SIN-LHR confirmed as a Business Saver award with a stopover in SIN. What we really wanted, however, was to commence her travel in Japan, only there was no availability whatsoever on any JP-SIN on the dates we required, so I waitlisted her on a couple of JP-SIN-EU flights instead. Yesterday I called KF to ask for the infamous "chaser", i.e. whether they could kindly nudge the revenue team into releasing a seat on one of her waitlisted itineraries. This morning she received an SMS that her waitlists had cleared on KIX-SIN-FRA and that her flights were now available for confirmation. Only thing was she did not have enough miles left in her account for us to simply confirm that booking online. So I called in and asked if they could the following, as that was what we would have liked the most, but we were not sure if we could expect it:
Take the first reservation ICN-SIN-LHR, which had already been confirmed earlier, and simply take the KIX-SIN leg from the second reservation that had now become available, to replace the ICN-SIN leg (and forget about the second segment SIN-FRA from the second reservation). I.e. that she could fly KIX-SIN-LHR, effectively using confirmed availability from two separate reservations to merge into one optimum routing.
The agent understood what I wanted immediately and set off to work, in the meantime reassuring me that they can make sure that the flights in question would not get "lost" by the system once he had made the chances and cancellations required to get the new - perfect - ticket issued.
It took about 20mins from when I had first called in until I ended the call that I had obtained exactly what I had wanted, and I was a very happy bunny indeed!
The experience from the other reservation a day earlier had been just as impressive.
So today I want to give credit where credit is due and say "Thank you, SQ!" for a job well done, again! ^
FYI: My wife and I are both SQ KF Gold though not PPS; I always call the Singapore KF Gold hotline and select the English language option. In 9 out of 10 cases my experiences with the staff there have been very positive, and I have the impression that they have become ever better of late.