escog

Hello all,

I recently set up an award flight using Singapore Krisflyer miles, but I got confused by the mileage requirements that the agent was telling me. Here’s the story:

I called in and tried to set up an award ticket for the following segments:

SFO-ORD-LHR-MUC(stopover)-CAI then CAI-IST-CPH-SFO

All in business class, except for the SFO-ORD segment, which was in economy. According to the star alliance award chart, this should be 138,000 miles roundtrip

The first thing the agent pointed out was that I had 7 segments, and there was a 6 segment limit on awards. I wanted to get a booking in place, so I told her to drop the MUC-CAI flight.

The agent was able to ticket this itinerary; and said the number of miles required was 130,000 miles. This seemed low to me, so I said fine, and just took it. In retrospect, this looks like it should have just been 2 one-ways: 65k miles one way in business class to Europe and 69k miles one way in business class from the Middle East. 130k is less than 134k; so I just left it alone.

I later found availability to go direct from CAI-CPH. This would reduce the number of segments, so I called back to change my flight and add the MUC-CAI segment back in.

The agent had no problem changing CAI-IST-CPH to CAI-CPH; but, when I asked her to add MUC-CAI, she said it would cost 29k miles extra. This is what I don’t understand - this itinerary looks like a roundtrip North America to Middle East with a stopover in Europe. I thought this would be 138k miles - which means they would have charged me 8K miles more on top of what was already spent. But, the agent insisted that I had to pay even more miles. She asked to call me back while she double checked with her manager. She called back and confirmed that it would be an extra 29k miles because I changed "zones". This confused me further, so I thanked her and hung up.

I’m going to try again, but wanted to check here if there was some rule I’m not aware of regarding stopovers and regions. I don’t see why adding this segment would cost an extra 29k. It seems like it should only be 138k for a roundtrip to the Middle East.

Thanks.

TravelwhileyouEat

- So your original flights were SFO-ORD-LHR-MUC return CAI-IST-CPH-SFO for 130k miles in J (still don't know how this happened but probably an oversight since it should be 134k)
- You want to change to SFO-ORD-LHR-(STOPOVER)MUC-CAI return CAI-CPH-SFO now apparently it's 159k miles in J (the extra 29k miles)

You technically did change zones from NA > Europe to NA > North Africa/ME. The only thing I can think of that's causing the 29k miles is this ...

- You paid 130k miles
- EU to ME/North Africa is 50k miles in J so that's 25k for a one-way

I believe it's because SQ does not allow stopover for one-way *A awards, this means that what you think is a stopover is actually a separate award, so you now have 3 awards namely:

SFO-ORD-LHR-MUC (NA>EU) 65k miles
MUC-CAI (EU>ME/NAfrica) 25k miles
CAI-CPH-SFO (NAfrica > NA) 69k miles

65 + 25 + 69 = 159k miles

The only way to solve this is to have them re-issue the award as a SFO - CAI - SFO round-trip award with the routing (SFO - ORD - LHR - MUC - CAI - CPH - SFO) all booked at the same time under one ticket so you have the free stopover in MUC. You'll need availability for this and there might be a penalty for re-booking since your awards appear to be issued as 2 one-ways instead of an open-jaw round-trip (because MUC and CAI are in different zones they probably could not do the open-jaw).

escog

Thanks for the analysis. I think you're probably right, but I was confused since it was a single ticket. If they had issued two award tickets, than I would have understood. Unfortunately, award availability has disappeared for the routing I was looking at, but I may just try to convince them to charge me the round trip price for NA - ME with a stopover.