Possible to request KF to open up award seats?

[pickering19292]

I recently achieved KrisFlyer Gold via the points transfer promotion that ran earlier this year. I have a sizeable number of KrisFlyer miles yet availability seems patchy for routes I'm looking for. Similar to Qantas Platinum, I am wondering if the program will open up award seats upon request to elites? If so, is the benefit extended to Gold, or only to PPS? many thanks.

 

[lovetravellingoz]

1/ Is availability patchy, or are you just trying to book popular locations not that far in advance?

Savers always go first. But many routes even for peak Europe still have Advantage redemptions available.

Less flights and/or smaller planes at present still mean that compared to pre-pandemic that there are less flights to book on.


2/ Gold is not that elite in the scheme of things. So I doubt it.

3/ KF does have the waitlist option.


3/ If a lot more people start buying tickets we will probably get more flights, and bigger planes on the more popular routes, and in turn probably more redemptions will also get then opened..

 

[dajop]

You really probably need to be PPS to actually have success in them opening up award seats, and even then, I'd say just economy awards. For golds, I'd suggest the chances are very low for opening up economy awards and almost non-existent for them to open up awards in other cabins.

Having said that, the way to do it is to waitlist for preferred flights and then call and request a "chaser" on the waitlisted flight you want.

 

[coolkid101]

We are pps solitaire. Hard to get seats opened up, very rare but possible. Not sure about economy. We tried for suites only. This is pre covid though. Haven't tried since. Its by no means an advertised benefit, our contact had to "call in favours", we were told, to get an extra suites released for an award. I know it was definitely an exception because there was only 1 seat left (of 6) but we bought the other 3 cash fare so maybe that helped? We just had a relative who wanted to come along and didn't want to pay cash fare and neither did we for her.
We were told if they couldn't release the R seat we would get J at least. All award availability gone by then for both classes.

Waitlist availability is bad. I wrote this in another thread - when we weren't sure when we wanted to travel we just got a whole week worth of flights reserved for us with ticketing deadline a week before departure. That would have taken away a weeks worth of saver availability for everyone else unfortunately.. But SQ is trying very hard to keep pps happy I think

Post automatically merged: Mar 5, 2022

Most airlines seem to be moving towards the American model of revenue based status = PPS.