Southeast Asia Archives - Tagging Miles

Save 50% on Regional Southeast Asia Awards with SilkAir!

June 14, 2017 By Trevor Leave a Comment

I’ve found SilkAir and Singapore Airlines to be very helpful when finding regional flights in Southeast Asia. It’s allowed me to hop around Asia and include a stop in Singapore for many trips. . Right now, you can save 50% on Regional Southeast Asia Awards with SilkAir, which makes it even more of a bargain.

Save 50% on Regional Southeast Asia Awards with SilkAir

It is important to note that this only applies to flights that are operated by SilkAir, Singapore’s regional carrier. SilkAir primarily operates narrow bodies, but they are comfortable for a sub 4-5 hour flight. I flew a SilkAir 737 from Phuket a few years ago and much enjoyed it.

You can save 50% on Regional Southeast Asia Awards with SilkAir!

The terms of the promotion are pretty simple: Book between 12 June and 11 July, for flights 1 July through 31 October and choose from 53 destinations.

This is for economy and business class awards. But, to be clear, they must be operated by SilkAir.

To give you an idea of some of your options, here’s a snip from Singapore’s website:

Singapore KrisFlyer SilkAir 50% Discount

SilkAir Flights eligible for 50% Discount on Award

As you can see, you can fly SilkAir to Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Laos. You can also fly to a number of cities in China, India, Sri Lanka, and even the Maldives! There are even more options for Economy class upgrades.

Wrapping Up

This is an excellent opportunity if you will be flying to Southeast Asia. Its a great opportunity to nest these 50% award flights with a tough to find over-water flight. It also is an excellent opportunity to leverage if you want to hop around Southeast Asia or even fly up to parts of China or out to the Maldives.

Will you be leveraging this amazing deal to save 50% on Regional Southeast Asia Awards with SilkAir?

Follow-up to Singapore KrisFlyer Awards – Examples

August 7, 2014 By Trevor 6 Comments

Introduction

Yesterday, I posted about using Singapore’s KrisFlyer miles from Singapore, and how many great options there are. Reader @Sanaial posed a great question:

@tmount the most confusing part is the variability of out-pocket costs with a lot of foreign programs
— Saianel (@saianel) August 6, 2014

A few examples

So I thought I’d put together some examples. The first option I looked at was Singapore to Phuket, Thailand in economy and business class. Its a short 1 hour, 45 minute non-stop flight operated by Singapore’s Silkair.

As you can see – Airport / Government taxes are constant at SGD 34.00 ($27.29 USD). You essentially pay a premium of 6,375 KrisFlyer miles and SGD 20.30 ($16.29 USD) to fly up front.

The second I chose to look at was Singapore to Denpasar-Bali, Indonesia in economy and business class. This is actually a longer flight at 2 and a half hours, and on Singapore’s regionally configured 777-200 (I think an angled layflat in business). The fares are consistent for economy and business, but you get an upgraded product and experience.

For example, just looking at a revenue ticket, ITA shows the same flight in business at SGD 1,096.50, so you’re looking at a roughly 90% discount for using miles, or 6.7 cents of “value” per mile.

Starting to see a trend here, I decided to look a little harder at the award chart, and found an interesting route that could be considered a sweet-spot on the award chart. First, here’s the map:

Hong Kong to Darwin, Australia via Singapore, courtesy of www.gcmap.com

The flights are pretty reasonable with respect to miles, but its much more expensive with respect to out of pocket costs, but really the difference between Business and Economy is 10,625 more miles, but not even 10% more in cost.

Ok, so in hindsight, maybe this isn’t the sweetest of spots, but I’ll keep looking.

Conclusion

So, while Singapore does charge fuel surcharges, you can still do reasonably well flying shorter distances on Singapore and Silkair metal. Given that, Singapore’s Changi Airport is both served by a bunch of airlines, and perhaps my favorite airport for a long layover.

Leveraging Singapore’s Krisflyer program from Singapore

August 6, 2014 By Trevor 4 Comments

Introduction

Yesterday, I looked at some hotel choices that looked pretty nice in Southeast Asia, now I just have to identify options for getting around. Since I’ll be flying into and out of Singapore, the logical choice is using Singapore’s KrisFlyer program.

Award Chart

The Krisflyer program determines the cost of the award by zones (15 of them). As you can imagine, with 15 zones, the chart is pretty big, so I’ve got a snipped subset below.

KrisFlyer Saver One Way award chart – zones 1-9.

If you want to look at the full award chart, you can find it here.

I did a brief search with KrisFlyer’s calculator, and had to beef it up to Business class to narrow it down to just 35 destinations costing 20,000 (or 7,500 or 12,500 miles in economy) or fewer KrisFlyer Miles. This is at the saver level, but I think it really shows the value if you are originating in Singapore.

Mapping Singapore's Zone 1 and 2 awards www.gcmap.com

Mapping Singapore’s Zone 1 to Zones 2 & 3 awards www.gcmap.com

But wait! It gets better! If you book it all online, you can save 15% the miles!

How to get Singapore KrisFlyer Miles

The KrisFlyer program is one of the easiest to transfer miles to, as you can move points from all three major “transferable points” programs, that is, Chase Ultimate Rewards (UR), American Express Membership Rewards (MR), and Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) Rewards. I’ve tested transferring points from all three programs, and noticed no lag transferring Chase Ultimate Rewards or American Express Membership Rewards points to KrisFlyer. SPG on the other hand has had a delay.

So really, the question isn’t necessarily how to get KrisFlyer miles so much as it is about getting UR, MR, or SPG points (Update: You can also transfer Citi Thank-you points!). I think the chart below underscores why transferable points are so great.

Chase UR, American Express MR and SPG Airline Transfer Partners.

Conclusion

This was just a quick overview of Singapore’s KrisFlyer program’s cool uses when you’re in Singapore. There are other benefits to flying Singapore Airlines if you’re visiting Singapore (such as discounted hop-on-hop-off bus tickets), I’ll try to cover that after I return, so I’ll have the freshest information. I’m sure the savvier of you are already thinking that there has to be some sweet spots on the KrisFlyer chart – I’ll start looking through and see if I can find anything fun to write about and hopefully have something next week.

Note: Kenny at Miles4More has a great series for sweet spots across a variety of airline programs.