Think Logically.
 

This is a major mistake by SQ and is likely to be reversed or cancelled.
There is no way any of us can know what will happen, so don't get your hopes too high.

All of the above being said, I went ahead and spent 420K miles since the only downside is that they will eventually refund my miles.

My guess is that UA will give us all some sort of compensation if they cancel these, but who knows.

Good Luck!

I booked using US miles over New Years and several hours after booking all the SQ flights dropped from the reservation. I rebooked on different dates and not have seats on SQ and the SQ website says I am ticketed while previously it said I was not ticketed. Hopefully I'm good to go this time!!

Did a booking around 10 am Pacific. Confirmation from UA end went through, and have SQ confirmed, but not ticketed. Anyone else booking around the same time get ticketed? Was told to wait two days, didn't sound promising.

Perhaps not. Maybe SQ is flying empty planes and they figure they may as well get some revenue out of them:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8HQ0Z620120626

Tip: SQ Record Locator
 

If your booking also involves a flight on another carrier that uses Amadeus (eg. LH, LO etc.) your SQ PNR = your LH PNR as they now use the same system.

^
Thanks for the tip.

Fewer than 10K. Probably fewer than 5k.

Maybe, but the US DoT has recently put in place some notable consumer protection rules which are very much in our favor. If the flight is to, from or via the USA then you have the power of the DoT and 49 U.S.C. 41712 § 399.88(a).

It will be quite hard for SQ to simply cancel all the tickets and tell the customers to pound sand unless they want to get into a pissing contest with the US government.

both UA and SQ display incorrect flight time
 

I booked on SQ62 (SIN>DME>IAH), both UA and SQ mobile site show the total travel time as 1 hour 40 minutes!

As a serious question, does this apply to mileage tickets? :confused:

Psshhh 35 minutes for me;)

Xld New years and booked Memorial Day
 

This way I can have more vacation time accrued. Better flights and all in F on UA (I know) and SQ on the 777. Probably going to go up to Langawi (sp) Island for a couple days on a cheap Air Asia fare while I am in SIN. So now we are going to PVG for New Years Eve. Colder but should still be warmer than NYC. Its seems as if I have run out of Europe destinations as I will be going Asia 4x in 5 months....

Still seeing F availability on SIN-LHR, SIN-SFO, SIN-IAH, SIN-BCN, SIN-MUC and SIN-MXP.
Earlier today I booked
EWR-SIN (SQ J)
SIN-SGN (SQ J) stop
SGN-BKK (TG J) stop
BKK-SIN (SQ J)
SIN-HKG-SFO (SQ F)
SFO-EWR (UA/pmCO F)

Not loving the three stops on the way home and ending in pmCo First on a redeye, but oh well.

The key term is "purchase," which does not appear to be limited to purchase by monetary funds. And a mileage "purchase" also includes payments of certain fees and taxes by relevant currency. But this situation may be the first test of the law/regulation as applied to frequent flyer miles, if it goes that far.

I get that too but rebook again doing it fast and it goes through

I think you vastly overestimate both the amount of people who are attuned to these sort of things and the amount of people who are as crazy as we are, and will plan a vacation/trip around a chance to fly SQ F.

I have a good friend in Moscow, I would visit there for the evening. As my stop would be about 22h, definitely leaving DME. The issue with the tourist visa is you need a letter of invitation from your hotel. Since I would be staying with a friend instead of a hotel it becomes a headache for a private person to apply for a letter of invitation, get it to me, etc... If the transit visa allows me to enter the country with nothing but proof of my arriving flight and my departing flight less than 24 hours later, that would be a lot easier for me to organize.

I notice that I can see my reservations on the mobile site (and I selected seats that way) and I can see them via checkmytrip. However, if I go to the Singapore site to manage bookings and enter the SQ PNR and last name it thnks a while and then simply returns me to the query page. Is there some trick to getting the main SQ site to look up a reservation that I am missing?

Using your ticket number or the PNR of the issuing airline must work.

I'm having the same problem. I was able to pull it up once and now it won't work. It does not generate an error, it just doesn't load anything. :confused:

Same here. Mine is part of a larger ticket with 3 other carriers. I wonder if that's the problem.

Any chance only simpler bookings display at the site?

I don't think KE would be able to do it on a REVENUE Ticket. This is an award ticket on United.

Yup, interestingly if you supply a clearly wrong PNR (I tried the original UA one knowing it was useless on the SQ site) you do get an error that it could not find such a record. But if you use the valid SQ one you just get nothing.

Seems a poor value to pay the 140k rate and get so few of the legs in F.

My UA record says the booking is ticketed and confirmed. I have a UA ticket #, an SQ locator and I have selected my seats. I also called SQ re. seat selection and their phone agent confirmed all my segments verbally. I feel pretty confident. That being said, I was only half-planning on going to Asia during this time frame before I found out about this deal, so I won't be too crestfallen if SQ pulls out and the miles end up back in my account.

No, the Singapore website requires the SQ PNR (or PNR from other airline that uses Amadeus, e.g. LH) or SQ ticket number. UA PNR and/or ticket number won't do.

I believe the difference between C and F is 10k miles one-way for US-Asia awards. Would I spend 10k extra for SIN-HKG-SFO-EWR in F instead of C? Probably.

It's not 140k.
Paying the business rate for the way out. And as for the way back, I'm fine in Business for the short flight to Singapore. There's nothing available SIN-FRA-JFK, which would be the only way to get all F on the return.

Personal pref. I suppose. I'd sooner try to go EWR-IAH-DME-SIN on the way there and squeeze in a sub-24 hour "connection" to spend a night with friends in Moscow on the way out, then return via SFO as he is. 18 hours is a long time to be on a plane, even with SQ.

Maybe this is SQ's new strategy to quiet those who say they never release awards to partners. Once a year, have a fire sale for 24 hours (and don't announce when it will be). And if you ever complain, they say - "What are you talking about, we released F and J on almost all routes for a full 24 hours, where were you?" :D

Exactly. Why not release a few award seats on long haul flights? Not only to make a little extra revenue for an otherwise empty seat, but also for marketing. Having experienced SQ on an award, passengers might just be willing to book those seats for future business travel instead of reflexively choosing UA.

I am still seeing some SQ availability but not on every flight and in every class. Sure, some of these awards were snatched up in the last 24 hours, but it's not like SQ was releasing every unsold seat for award redemption. Usually just a couple of seats per flight, which is what most of the world thinks should be available anyway. Makes me wonder how much of a mistake this really is/was.

A quick look at the seat maps shows anywhere between 0/8 and 7/8 F seats reserved (mostly between 2/8 and 4/8) on SQ1 this coming week. Sure, the seatmap is not a 100% indication of actual bookings, but it doesn't seem like SQ sells out F very often.

Perhaps SQ is going to go the way of LH because of their switch to Amadeus?

Maybe under SQ's old reservation system due to technical limitations they had no choice but to restrict access to award inventory on their 77W and A380 flights so that they won't be viewable / bookable by their *A partners (while bookable for their own members)?

However, now that they're using Amadeus (which LH also uses), they now have the ability to restrict viewership/booking of their award inventory to certain "Amadeus office IDs" within SQ's own frequent flyer program (so their own members have first choice of awards) and then about 2 weeks prior to departure lift this restriction and allow other *A partners to view/booking their award inventory.

My speculation is that this module hasn't been turned on yet (they're probably still ironing out other technical issues that are more critical after the migration to Amadeus) so that's why we're seeing lots of SQ award inventory.

I am guessing that once this module is turned on, we'll be seeing lots of "phantom availability" for SQ flights on the UA and perhaps other *A partner websites which may then only be bookable approximately 7-14 days before departure.

On a separate note: When CX switched over to Amadeus several months ago, they were overzealous in implementing security features that restricted access to their award inventory by their partner airilnes (eg. AA). AA members were not able to book CX awards for a couple of weeks.

Having only one stop en route to SGN is nice.
Other options are:
EWR-DOH-BKK-SGN on QR with an overnight in DOH, which seems silly
EWR-IST-BKK-SGN on TK with 12 hours in IST.

or United metal to ZRH, CDG, or LHR, and then SQ J to SIN.
18 hours on a plane is long, but 20hrs plus a 2 hour stop isnt much better.

Quick heads up: SQ releasing almost all F award (O)
 

Daniel,
In light of the Amadeus switchover and problems we are having seeing sq pnrs on sq.com (and sometime sq mobile); would Lufthansa.com be a reliable alternative? Or is there nothing that comes close to equalling seeing it on sq.

I like trying to toss in a few 20-23 hour "connections" when the flight times allow to get a night here or there in different cities. Definitely wouldn't advise anyone to deal with the train wreck that is QR award bookings now that UA agents have been lied to a brainwashed that QR bookings can't be made after 6/15. It took me about a week to straighten out my CDG-DOH-TBS-IST-BEY, CAI-ZRH-BCN booking because two of the legs were on QR and I still haven't been re-credited the 35,000 miles UA owes me.

Lufthansa.com will only work if the Amadeus PNR also includes LH segments.

Try www.checkmytrip.com (or classic.checkmytrip.com). CheckMyTrip allows you to view entire Amadeus PNRs.

The SQ website will only display Amadeus PNRs that have SQ flights as the first segment (this is based on some testing I have done).

As a note, I am no way affiliated with SQ or their IT partners.

I've got 0 experience booking any sort of stopover, but would like to if I could. I've tried to read up on the *A threads about how they work, but am still a bit confused. Would it be possible to go from maybe DFW to Moscow, stop over in Moscow with Vietnam as the final destination before heading back to the states? If not Vietnam, some other country in Asia other than Signapore, and keep the Moscow stop over? Any tips or suggested routes with a stopover would be greatly appreciated.

Absolutely.

Just in!
 

Thanks OP!

Booked SQ 15/SQ 866 SFO-SIN-HKG, and HKG-SIN-LAX on A380, both on J.

An interesting thing I found out is that if I book using one way SFO-HKG, I can get SQ 15 with UA 896 connecting in SIN. Total 60,000 miles and $ 12.

Since I want to maximize SQ experience, I use multi-city SFO-SIN-HKG booking. However, if I choose SQ 890, it is 77,500 Miles and $12.00; on the other hand, if I choose SQ 866 or UA 896, it is 60,000 Miles and $12.00. Why is there a 17500 mile difference for the booking?

Not that SQ has a huge presence here....

Something Singapore has never minded doing in the past. It's nice to be a small rich country that does not need the US's money OR protection.

Yeah, but how would being disallowed to serve US airports (if it came to that) affect SQ's bottom line? Not as if DoT has no teeth whatsoever...

Just booked and confirmed SMF>LAX>NRT in business class on the A380 for April for 6 days. Will have a few lunches and dinners with friends in Tokyo and come back the same route for 120k miles.

Might be a dumb question, but how do I get my seats confirmed on the 2 Singapore flights? I was able to choose seats on the UA domestic portions, but I thought it wasn't a good idea to call SG? Is there another way to choose seats online that I don't know about? This is my first award booking (and one that will be hard to beat as a newbie!).

I have my UA PNR number and the confirmation email/itinerary. Any help will be appreciated ;) I don't want to screw this up!