How Does the Waitlist Feature With Singapore Krisflyer Miles Work?

A great but often overlooked feature of Singapore Airlines’ Krisflyer program is the ability to waitlist for awards on Singapore flights if saver space is not available – most airlines will only give you the option of booking a standard award (for double the miles – or more!) or manually checking to see if space opens up closer to departure. This works for awards on Singapore Airlines flights in any class of service.

 

Here’s how it works:

1) Search for your preferred itinerary on singaporeair.com

On the Singapore Airlines homepage, click the ‘Redeem Flights’ button and put in your itinerary details. (Select 1 passenger even if you’re looking for multiple seats – I’ll explain why later.) Once you hit Search, you will be prompted to log in to your Krisflyer account if you’re not already logged in.

2) Find the flight you’re looking for

In this example, there is Standard award space on the non-stop flight for 70,000 miles, but we can waitlist for Saver space which would only cost 38,000 miles.

3) Select Waitlist and proceed through the booking process, just like you were actually booking a ticket.

The website will ask you for the passenger’s travel details and citizenship information. If you’re booking for yourself, this will be auto-filled from your Krisflyer profile.

4) Click ‘Confirm and Waitlist’

Krisflyer will not ask you for credit card details until they can confirm you a seat on the flight, so once you submit your passenger details the waitlist spot is reserved. You’ll receive an email with a confirmation number and your itinerary details.

5) Rinse and Repeat

For the best chance of clearing the waitlist, you can repeat this process for multiple flights. Once you’re done waitlisting, you can also book a confirmed seat on another flight – if you clear the waitlist on one of your preferred flights, you can call the Krisflyer Service Center to switch your confirmed reservation to that new flight for free, as long as it has the same routing and class of service.

6) Wait for an email from Krisflyer

If you clear the waitlist, you’ll get an email giving you a deadline (about 1 day) by which to provide payment details and confirm your seat. If you don’t book the seat before the deadline expires, you will be removed from the waitlist, but you won’t be charged or lose any miles.

 

Important notes:

• You must have sufficient Krisflyer miles in your account before waitlisting for a flight. (Because of this, if you want to book a confirmed seat on an alternate flight, make sure you waitlist for all desired flights before booking your confirmed reservation.
• You cannot waitlist for Saver space if you have booked a Standard award on the same flight.
• If you’re trying to book seats for multiple passengers, put them on the waitlist separately – seats are more likely to open up one at a time, which means if you have a reservation for 2 passengers on the waitlist, you’ll get skipped if only 1 seat becomes available.
• Krisflyer Elite Silver and Elite Gold members have priority on the waitlist.
• Waitlisting is only available for flights booked on Singapore Airlines with Krisflyer miles – you can’t waitlist for space on any partner airline, or when using another airline’s miles (like United or Alaska) to book a ticket operated by Singapore.

 

Have you ever used Singapore’s waitlist feature before?