txp

Hi everyone,

I managed to book SFO-SIN in saver F.

I keep checking every few days to see if saver F/suite opens up on either LAX-SIN or JFK-SIN. (I live in Texas so I am indifferent between the two).

The balance in my KF account right now is virtually zero.

In the event a saver suite opens up on the LAX-SIN or JFK-SIN flights, I would like to cancel my SFO-SIN flight, redeposit the miles, and book the new flight.

However,

I am concerned that if the mile redeposit does not happen instantaneously, I risk losing the seat on the new flight and also on the old flight.

Could someone please tell me if the mileage redeposit is instantaneous, OR if I can just make a change to the ticket by changing the departure gateway without redepositing the miles?

Thank you all very much!

Durian

Sorry, but no, it's not instantaneous. Will take a couple of days, expect 1 week I'd say. And for the taxes it's longer, couple of weeks. In this particular case I would call them up to see what they can do, I'm sure they can hold on to a seat especially if they have the assurance that the miles are coming in a couple of days.

txp

OK, thanks a lot for the reply. I am glad I asked. Otherwise I would have run the risk of losing both...

In case a suite opens up, I will call to see what they can do (in terms of changing the ticket directly), but no big deal if they can't change it.

cmdsea

In my experience if you cancel online its instantaneous but if you cancel via phone it takes a few days.

I last did it a few months ago. Wanted 3 seats but only 2 savers and 1 standard available. Booked and ticketed the 3 seats but waitlisted for a saver. About 2 weeks before the flight got the SMS saying the saver was available and had 24Hrs to confirm. Went online and cancelled the standard seat, the miles instantly re-appeared and then issued the saver award. All done within 10 mins of receiving the sms.

Can you waitlist for the 2 flights you are interested in so at least you end up with a booking confirmation window rather than a dynamic booking that could disappear at any second..?

Aeran

I just did this a week and a half ago - had 2x confirmed First Saver flights (HND-SIN) and 2x waitlisted Suites Saver (NRT-SIN), but not enough miles to ticket the latter without first getting the miles back from cancelling the former. The waitlist was only confirmed the day before the flight, so waiting a few days for the miles to redeposit wasn't an option.

Thankfully, when I called in and asked for the cancellation in order to confirm my waitlist they offered to give an 'urgent redeposit' and my miles were immediately credited back on the website. They also offered to confirm the waitlist on the call as well, so it shouldn't be a problem for you to immediately re-use the miles of the cancelled flight to confirm the waitlisted one. Just call in and explain what you need and they'll sort it out for you, shouldn't be a problem.

FYI I believe it isn't possible to cancel award tickets online anymore - you need to call in to cancel it nowadays.

SingaporeDon

Did they give you the 15% online booking discount for the new redemption, or was that forfeited?

Aeran

I still received the 15% online booking discount when confirming the waitlisted redemption, both through the site and when I called in again to confirm & pay over the phone.

SQueeze

Call in, let them know your situation and concerns exactly as how you describe it here on this forum.

I have called in for urgent redeposit and immediate issuance while having online discount honored like situation you are facing. Just call in first.

You will see the 5-starness of SQ in this area. They will bend backwards as much as they can to please their customers as long as it is within reasons and they don't lose money. They can waive plenty of rules : I have had expired tickets reinstated. I have had lost waitlisted bookings reinstated. I have had non-refundable tickets refunded.

Don't worry about rules and terms and conditions with SQ. Call in, explain, sometimes appeal is required. At the end of the day, there is a human that will handle your case and your requests will usually be given so long as they don't lose money.

carrotjuice

Good to know. But I observe this is rather "un-Singaporean" considering their rigid education and how they have grown up with prescriptive manuals and rules that they rarely question.

Perhaps these may also have been written into their framework - LOL! - but a breath of fresh air nonetheless against dealing with the likes of local telcos and banks!

SQueeze

Note that they usually don't do so at first instance.

I requested for appeal cases. And it depends from agent to agent. So far, I never encountered very difficult agents though.

Which is why I am still happy with SQ although prices ex-SIN are just ridiculous. But ex-SGN an and ex-India, very good prices for the value they offer.

aviationp

I would like to just remind anyone reading this that while this is true recognize who is posting it. A KF Gold member, these anecdotal experiences can be seen by loyal Singapore Airlines flyers. If you are looking for an exception for 1 Suite Class ticket by transferring 91,375 AMEX Reward points and you have a limited history with SQ on revenue tickets, chances of them creating an exception are as close to zero. The reason they have these "exceptions" is so they can reward their true frequent flyers and at the same time exclude those that have a mileage relationship with Singapore Airlines like those earning a 100,000 mile bonus.

People might think that KF Gold/Silver or PPS are essentially useless, but it is through these benefits that SQ awards their members. A PPS member can obviously get way more exceptions than a thrice a year economy class KF Blue member, but the latter can still get some exceptions.

tng11

My recent experience with cancelling and redepositing was much faster than I had expected.

I wasn't given the option to cancel my booking online to begin with, so I called in to cancel at about 1pm Singapore time. Agent said the fee was USD$30 to be deducted from my tax refund and warned it could take "more than 3 weeks."

When I checked again at 8pm Singapore time the same day, the miles were already back in my account. ^

intermagix

I called to cancel my award tickets because I needed to request for waiver of cancellation fees. The miles were not deposited instantly, and after waiting for a day or two, I called SQ customer service. I explained that I needed the miles urgently to book 2 saver business class seats from Japan to Singapore. After the call, the miles were deposited back into my account.

mherdeg

Trying to figure this out now. We waitlisted an award SYD-SIN-LAX and in the meantime ended up booking and waitlisting a separate SYD-SIN-SFO (different dates).

The waitlisted SYD-SIN-LAX has now been confirmed, and we're trying to call SQ reservations to (1) ticket the new reservation and also (2) refund and redeposit the miles from the existing reservation, presumably not in that order.

There is a ticketing deadline 4 days from now, so a little bit of time to sort things out here…

So far 0/2 with phone agents understanding how to do this. I think we may need to end up just cancelling and redepositing the reservation and mentioning that we need the miles back ASAP to ticket another award … will see how that goes.

Edit: third agent seemed to have things together. "We need our ticketing office to work on the refund, it's a little complicated because this ticket has been reissued multiple times. It will take a few hours and perhaps up to 24 hours to redeposit the miles into your account. I will call you, and send you an e-mail, when the miles have been returned to your account. You can also call us tomorrow morning to confirm" (about 24 hours from now). We'll see !

Edit: it has been a few hours and half of the miles have come back — we refunded a one-way 2-pax itinerary and my account balance now reflects the addition of half of the total mileage amount we paid for the trip we are refunding. I assume the office is still doing something.

Edit: called back 24 hours later since, still, only half of the miles have been refunded (so we are unable to book the new reso that we have on hold). Phone agent said "yes, I see that your wife called earlier. It could take a while, you know, it could be up to 4 weeks [?!]". Asked the agent to verify the ticketing deadline of the PNR we are trying to ticket with our canceled trip's miles. Agent: "Ah, yes, it's 24 August. I will go ahead and put in a request to extend the ticketing deadline on that other trip since you are still waiting on half of your refunded miles to post. I do not know what the new ticketing deadline will be. I will do that as soon as I hang up on you."

Edit: called back 36 hours later. Phone agent sez: "your new reservation's ticketing deadline is now 30 August" (great! we can fix this in The Private Room on the outbound portion of our journey that's booked on another record). Agent also says re: the two old tickets from the canceled reso we tried to refund: "I see that these two tickets are both refunded." I asked why, if these tickets were both in refund status, only half of the miles had re-appeared in our account. The agent put me on about a ten-minute hold, then came back and said she will investigate and call me back with the answer. Fair enough.

Edit: called back about 48 hours after cancellation. New phone agent says: "it seems that they did cancel the ticket and miles have been refunded but the miles have not reappeared". The agent will call AU reservations and hopefully it will be fixed today (but who knows).

Edit: 60 hours after cancellation, and still both tickets are flagged canceled+refunded but the miles have only come back from one of them. I think something is broken here and we will require a person. We've been calling the "KrisFlyer Member Services" phone number; I wonder if regular reservations can help in a different way or whether there's a customer-service contact who can help? Answer is "no", regular reservations can look at the e-ticket and say it's refunded but cannot advise whether the miles have been returned or when they will be. (Regular reservations will transfer to KrisFlyer member services.) There is now evidently a note on our PNR that says "pax has asked when miles will come back and has been advised we don't know", which is interesting. It would presumably be more accurate for the note to say "pax has been advised that one ticket was correctly refunded and the other ticket was incorrectly incompletely refunded and has been advised there is no expected time for a fix." Res agent said "I don't know about KrisFlyer miles, let me transfer you to a KrisFlyer rep who knows about miles", then transferred me to a rep who said "I don't know about KrisFlyer miles, let me give you some phone numbers". Gave us two US phone numbers, +1 4434405438 (which I have not gotten before) and +1 2134040301 (which we have been calling).

Edit: called back Monday morning Singapore time, about 3-4 days after initial cancel. "Hi, I'm just calling because I recently refunded two e-tickets but only see the miles came back for one of them. Here are the eticket numbers." Phone agent: "Hmm. Both tickets are showing refunded, sir!" Me: "I agree, the coupon status is definitely Refund. But my mileage balance only shows half of the miles. I just wanted to make sure that nothing went wrong … we refunded these tickets quickly/urgently on Friday because we need the miles for another reservation." Agent: "Let me put you on hold." Agent comes back after five minutes: "I see that for one of these 2 pax, the eticket was refunded but miles did not successfully recredit. We have an internal escalation team who works Monday-to-Friday business hours and will handle this today or tomorrow. We have removed the ticketing deadline from your upcoming trip altogether and you can ticket it as late as date of travel." Cool, ok, we will follow up then!

Edit: ok, at the end of the Singapore business day Monday the miles had come back. So it looks like the timeline is – Thursday, request refund, it may happen within same business day. Friday, notice problem and escalate it. Monday (next business day), problem is escalated and resolved. Not bad!

shuigao

I wonder what causes the inconsistency. I've been waiting for almost a week now for my cancelled award ticket miles to be refunded

(I called in to cancel).