Frustrations with booking a Singapore Airlines A380 Suites class award ticket

I think everyone has seen this article already about the guy who flew in the Singapore Airlines A380 Suites class.  This has been on my bucket list ever since I found out about it years ago although the new Etihad First Apartments may have 1-upped it.  This was my ‘adventure’ in trying to book it.

So I booked my flight to Australia last week from this post and now I’ve been looking at return flights.  I had considered doing the Asiana A380 ICN-LAX in First coupled with the Thai A380 from SYD-BKK also in First, but that was almost 130K per person ONE-WAY.  Plus the connection times were pretty bad (long layovers and overnight layovers too).  Then I found out Etihad opened up the Apartments availability on their SYD-AUH route, but I couldn’t find availability for my dates and times, so can’t go with them.  My plan C is to just use Alaska miles to book Fiji Airways from basically Fiji to Seattle for 55K in business per person one way.  However, I was thinking about possibly doing Singapore’s A380 suites, and so that’s when my adventure began.

SYDNEY-SEATTLE

Since I live in Seattle, my ultimate goal was to get from Australia (or more likely Auckland) back to Los Angeles and then make my way to Seattle from LAX.  Seattle to LAX shouldn’t be a problem since I was booking so far out.  Thus, I’m just trying to look for Sydney to LAX.  This is the final route I wanted to take – SQ232 A380 suites from SYD-SIN and then SQ12 (A380 suite) from SIN-NRT with continuation of SQ12 from NRT-LAX.

SYDNEY-LAX AVAILABILITY

Let’s start the search from Sydney to LAX just to see what’s available.  These were the 3 options it gave me and it looks like no availability.  Bummer.  So let’s piece this leg by leg to see what the problem is, and let’s start with the first leg, the SYD-SIN route:

SYDNEY-SINGAPORE AVAILABILITY

Perfect!  2 first class seats available on both flights.  Of course we’d rather fly on the A380 though.  So now we know we shouldn’t have a problem getting to Singapore.  Now let’s search for Sydney to Narita to see what comes up:

SYDNEY-NARITA AVAILABILITY

Notice how now I can only take SQ212 from Sydney to Narita even though we know from the previous search that SQ232 had 2 seats available too.  Notice also that by taking SQ212, I connect to SQ12 to Narita, which is what I want.  Now let’s search for Narita-LAX.

NARITA-LAX AVAILABILITY

Oh look!  SQ12 from Narita to LAX with 2 seats available!  This must mean SQ12 should be available then from SIN-NRT-LAX, so let’s search for that:

SINGAPORE-LAX AVAILABILITY

Well that’s odd.  From the 2 prior searches, SQ12 should have 2 seats available from Singapore to LAX, but it doesn’t.  At this point, I was a bit confused.  I figure my best option was to just call up Singapore and have them manually book the flights for me (I didn’t care about the 15% points discount if I booked through their web site since the web site couldn’t give me the flights I wanted.)

Calling Singapore Airlines

So I called up Singapore Airlines by dialing 800-742-3333.  After 5 minutes on hold, it turns out I had to call a different number since I was booking an award ticket.  I had to call 214-404-0301 instead.  When you call that number, and you don’t enter in your membership number, you are actually routed back to the revenue ticket line, which is what you don’t want.  So make sure you enter in your membership number and pin!

After a short hold, I was connected to someone in Singapore I think.  I told him to check the availability route-by-route, and he saw the same things I saw.  That’s when I asked him if he could price out an award ticket basically on SQ232 (A380) and then SQ12 (A380).  He basically told me that availability differed by region, which made no sense.  He then told me that each route has a ‘quota,’ which means that if I flew SYDNEY to SINGAPORE, the airline has allotted a specific number of award seats on that route.  If I searched SYDNEY to NARITA (connecting through SINGAPORE), that reservation has a different number of award seats allotted to it.  I then asked him if I booked the SYDNEY to NARITA, could I call back and change my flight to the A380 from SYDNEY to TOKYO.  He didn’t give me a direct answer or maybe I forgot, but I believe he said we could be ‘waitlisted’ for that flight.

What to do here

I then asked him what should I do in this instance.  He suggested I book 1 ticket from SYDNEY to LAX (the first picture, when searched for 1 seat, had availability) and then book a 2nd ticket as a ‘waitlist.’ I could then call back and “link” the 2 itineraries together and improve my chances of the 2nd seat clearing.  I asked him how soon would I know if the 2nd one clears, and he said it could take up to 3 hours before the flight, which was ridiculous.  I then told him, “Imagine it’s December 8 and I’m in Sydney and only have 1 confirmed seat home.  I can’t leave my wife back in Sydney because her flight didn’t clear.”  He couldn’t empathize with that situation.

Flyertalk to the rescue

While researching this issue, I couldn’t find any blogs that talked about this issue.  The best I could do was find this Flyertalk thread about people asking experiences about the waitlist clearing.  Reports range from clearing within a week of putting in the request to a day or two before the flight.  It seems the waitlist is manually cleared, and the squeaky wheel gets a turn (is that the right phrase)?  I’m still undecided on what I’m going to do, but wanted to pass on these “intricacies” of using Singapore Airline miles.