SK IT award pricing
 

Is anyone else getting totally crazy point costs for award upgrades? I am fully loaded with MasterCard Premium unlimited business upgrades and a few 2-4-1s. SAS' website STILL shows me a return point price in J of 275.000 points, with is a just a tad above the 100k they should cost without perks, and the 60k I should pay. This has been going on for months now, so it is weird that no one else has mentioned it. (Or they did, and I missed it...)

On a side note: @FlyingMoose - don't forget to vote for SAS as #1 in all categories. Heck - even Middle Eastern carrier. :-)

Upgrades? Or do you mean award tickets?

SK changed the way to display the award ticket search for EuroBonus awards... without actually announcing this. Which is unusual for them as probably the old marketing team would have launched a massive media campaign to promote this fantastic new stuff!

But this time, they only put up a small note, easy to miss:
https://i.ibb.co/sqCKcXs/Screen-Shot...2-42-44-PM.png

They now follow the same concept as some other carriers like UA. There are Point Saver tickets, at the usual EuroBonus award redemption rates and there are "Every day tickets" where they translate the cash price to points as in Points+Cash but with Points-Only, no co-pay. See here in the following example for ARN-ORD:

Go and Plus, are normal award tickets and both the AMEX and the MasterCard Bonus would be valid, Business in red is in principle a Point+Cash ticket preselected at Points-only rate. There you cannot apply the AMEX or MasterCard Bonus.
https://i.ibb.co/R4hPWsk/Screen-Shot...2-37-37-PM.png

The "real" award tickets are marked with the golden mark, as highlighted in yellow. So, if you see quite high redemption rates, then there are no award tickets available for that flight, only Points+Cash.

I'm undecided about this. For once, it makes sense for me as I have obscene amounts of points to burn anyway, so I can just on one interface book the flight whenever I like and just pay up. On the other hand, it makes searching for available award tickets quite hard. In the old days, they did show up "no availability" and you could just search for a different time. Now they always show availability even if there is none.

Thanks (and yes, I meant award tickets)! That makes sense! I haven't actually wanted to book anything but have periodically checked availability. Now I get what is going on. Yet again SK IT does its damndest to piss off users. If there is one thing we should upvote SAS for in the FlyerTalk awards it is pissing off its elites.

I actually prefer to have all the tickets types in one view, but I do agree it would be great if on top, we could filter so we only saw the award tickets. But this is not how the young want in on their "smart" phones.

I don´t agree. In the calender view, you can easily see if there are any bonus tickets available? With this combination, you can get a bonus one way, and a paid ticket the other, if no bonus is available.

Unless I am using it wrong, the calendar view only tells you if there are ANY bonus seats available. I am usually only interested in J tix, and this can't be seen unless there are ONLY J seats available, making calendar view more frustrating than helpful most of the time.

real question... has anyone been able to get biz on another carrier to show up with the online star award tool?

Yes, e.g. SK list 9 options for CPH-NYC next Tuesday including UA, AC, LH and LX:
https://i.ibb.co/f0jyK4r/Screen-Shot...6-04-00-PM.png

But I find the availability to be inconsistent with e.g. UAs search engine. And so far 99 out of 100 times, I was able to get seats which UA showed as Business Saver (I) or First Class Saver (O) by calling in. Also you have to call in for e.g. using a different feeder flight for a longer layover or a mixed cabin award. The tool just plainly blocks out economy to LHR, FRA, MUC, ZRH, VIE, WAW, CPH, ARN or OSL for connecting to a business class long haul from there. Same for starting the long haul from CPH, OSL or ARN and connecting to a domestic short haul in North America or Asia.