SQ’s new A380 Suites are all set to fly…but where’s the saver space?

There’s only a few days until SQ’s brand new A380 enters service on 18 December with SQ221 on the SIN-SYD route. 9V-SKU is currently en route to Singapore from Airbus’ factory in Toulouse.

Other luminaries of the miles and points game are in attendance. The Milelion is not, because they have yet to invent an aircraft that can lift so much beefcake.

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I could be small-minded and petty and complain about not being invited, so I will. But in addition to that, I wanted to showcase an interesting look at the award space situation on the new A380 as we approach the launch date. 

What’s the award situation like?

Back at the start of November I did some research on the saver award situation on SQ’s new A380 launch route. The conclusion was that it was slim pickings throughout. I could find Business Saver availability from April 2018 onwards, but there were no Suite Savers in sight.

I searched all the way to 30 June via the KVSTool and then gave up, having not found a single seat. But I came across this fascinating visual chart mashup done by Vgutkovsky on Flyertalk which he’s kindly given me permission to reproduce. He’s written a script to fetch Suite saver availability for 355 days out (the max the system allows) on SQ221 starting 12 December. Here’s his data presented in radar chart form:

You see some greens and yellows there indicating availability and waitlist availability respectively, but those dry up post 18 Dec (Note that the chart above suggests there is waitlist Saver space on SQ221 on 20 December. I wasn’t able to find that when I searched, which leads me to believe its existence (if ever) was transitory). This confirms what I suspected, that there is 0 suites saver available at all, no matter how far you search.

For fun, here’s a chart that shows SQ 221 (new suites) and SQ 231 (old suites) Suites saver availability combined. Obviously, since SQ 221 is all red, any availability you see here is on 231.

vgutkovsky suggests this means that SQ releases Suite saver award space 9 days out. I’m not sure I’d agree with that. I think what it means is that SQ has segmented SQ221 Suites saver space into two buckets. Pre-new product and post-new product. Post new product Suites saver is simply unavailable.

SQ has clearly learned from the uproar that happened back in 2006 when they introduced the new business and first class products and disallowed saver redemptions on the new products for a few years. I think what they’re doing this time is making it unofficial policy that Suites saver will not be allowed on the new A380 suites, so they avoid the backlash but still get the benefit of not giving the seats away for free. And honestly, who can blame them. 6 seats means less revenue, and giving away 1 seat on award space means losing 1/6 of revenue versus 1/12 with the old configuration.

FYI, vgutkovsky has done a couple other charts for the JFK-FRA route that are well worth checking out here.

Trying SQ’s new A380

If you didn’t play A380 roulette back when you could, I’m afraid it’s going to be difficult to get a Suites saver ticket in the near future on the new product. What you could do is try to anticipate SQ’s next A380 launch route, which looks almost confirmed to be SQ322/305 from Singapore to London as per Ben’s research from 1 March 2018. Unfortunately, saver space on this route is already gone, so we may have come to the point where you’ll need to pre-empt the third route.

Good luck!