Winter 2013 First Class Singapore Award Trips & My Points Filled Weekend

I was away in Philly most of this past weekend extending what was to be only an overnight stay for the SPG Meet & Greet with Coldplay. The experience was very cool and I’ll be posting a review along with the pictures as soon as I receive them from the tour promoter later this week.  It was a fruitful points weekend as well, earning SPG points at the Le Meridien Philadelphia (which we really loved) as well as qualifying for the Carlson Country Inn & Suites Stay 1 Get 1 So Go via a “stay” at the Long Island City property on the way back from the beach yesterday.  Though the property is new, I’m glad I wasn’t actually staying there, more on that in tomorrow’s post.  However, I am excited that the stay posted faster than any of my previous Carlson stays and earned me 48,525 points (1,683 stay points, 842 points Gold 50% bonus, 44,000 Stay 1 Get 1 bonus, and 2,000 online booking gold member bonus).

Unfortunately, with the chaos of the weekend I wasn’t as current as usual with my blog and forum reading and I almost missed out on the Singapore first class ticket booking frenzy. On Saturday, Lucky posted that award availability normally exclusively available to Singapore Airline’s own KrisFlyer frequent flyer members was displaying for all Star Alliance members, including United, US Airways, and Aeroplan. The glitch was most likely due to a system upgrade scheduled to be completed by 10am (EST) Sunday.  FlyerTalk also had an extremely active thread on the topic and of course before I could even read through the pages of posts, I found myself immediately jumping over to United’s website. I was very much relived and pleasantly surprised to find first class award space still available over 12 hours after it was supposed to have disappeared.  I went to work fast and booked and ticketed two itineraries, figuring as a Platinum member I could cancel them later with no fee . Though I’ve flown Singapore’s all business EWR-SIN flight, I’ve never had the opportunity to experience their first class service and it was an opportunity I didn’t want to miss out on. Winter isn’t looking so bad anymore!

First was a flight to Melbourne, Australia with the hope that the 777-300ER on the SIN-MEL leg will be swapped out by February for the A380 (it’s been swapped!), putting me in a Singapore suite for over 8 hours!  Even if the swap doesn’t happen, 80k miles and $26.50 USD to experience Singapore first is worth it for me.  I’ll work on the New York legs today, I wanted to get my Singapore legs ticketed first.  Update – JFK-SFO booked, the UA agent was very jealous of the itinerary calling it the nicest first class in the world.

Next was a trip to Bali that I’ve been looking to book for a while, though instead of using my AA or BA miles on Cathay I’ll now have the option to fly Singapore first (the long way via Houston – Moscow – Singapore on SQ61). Australia and Bali within two months might be a little much so I will probably choose to fly only one of these two trips based on which route gets the A380 upgrade. Not bad for 70,000 miles and $32 USD in taxes and it’s not everyday that you see a LGA-DPS itinerary!

Both of my itineraries ticketed within ten minutes of booking and I have Singapore confirmation numbers for them both.  Will Singapore honor these awards? No one knows but there is positive and negative speculation on the FlyerTalk thread.

Did you take advantage of the glitch and make any speculative bookings?  Where are you headed? Do you think Singapore will honor our bookings?

Update – It appears that there is still ample business availability on the the shorter SIN-MLE and SIN-DPS flights but no Singapore First or Business availability on the long-haul.