Covid-19: Singapore Airlines extending elite status for selected members

KrisFlyer and PPS Club members with upcoming membership year ends are receiving a pleasant surprise in their email- another year of status, courtesy of Singapore Airlines.

With the ongoing Covid-19 situation, many people have cancelled both personal and work trips. For elite members, this potentially throws a spanner into the re-qualification plan.

In light of that, it’s great to hear that Singapore Airlines is proactively extending elite status by a year for members with membership years ending soon. Here’s the email being sent out:

In case you can’t read that, it says:

Thank you for your support of Singapore Airlines over the years.

In view of the COVID-19 situation, we will be renewing your Elite Silver status for another membership year. The new membership year will start from 28 February 2020.

If you have successfully accrued sufficient Elite miles before 28 February 2020, your membership will be automatically renewed for another year.

The new membership validity period will be reflected in your digital card on the SingaporeAir mobile app after 1 March 2020. Your membership kit, including your membership card with the new validity period, will take approximately 8-10 weeks after your status renewal on 1 March 2020 to reach you, due to a disruption in our card production supply chain.

In the interim, you can still enjoy your membership benefits using your digital card. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Once again, we thank you for your support and hope you will enjoy your Elite Gold privileges in the year ahead.

Yours Sincerely, KrisFlyer Membership Services

I reached out to Singapore Airlines for comment, and got the following:

“Singapore Airlines has renewed the membership of selected KrisFlyer Elite Silver, Elite Gold, PPS and Solitaire PPS Club members for another year in recognition of their long-time support.”

What’s less clear is exactly who gets these emails- is every member eligible, or only those within a certain threshold of re-qualification? How many years do you need to have been a member to get this extension? What happens if your membership year ends later in 2020? Is this extension being offered only to Singapore-based members, or to all members worldwide?

I’m guessing these mails are being sent out now for members with year ends in February, so sit tight if you haven’t got one yet. My membership year ends in March, and I’d be very interested to see if I get an extension, given my year-to-date status looks like this:

Yes, when you redeem a lot of miles, you’re not buying a lot of tickets.

That said, I’m just a lowly KrisFlyer Elite Silver now so re-qualification isn’t exactly a life or death situation. I do imagine that this would be a lot more important to someone with Elite Gold/PPS/Solitaire PPS status.

As a reminder, here’s the regular qualification requirements for each tier of membership:

TierRequirement (in 12 consecutive months)
KF Elite Silver25,000 elite miles
KF Elite Gold50,000 elite miles
PPS ClubS$25,000 PPS Value
Solitaire PPS ClubS$50,000 PPS Value

Other loyalty programs are also offering extensions

Andaz Singapore

Singapore Airlines isn’t alone in offering extensions; we’re seeing hotel chains like Hyatt extend elite status for members in Asia. It’s a very nice gesture, and I hope that other chains follow suit (and that we don’t see widespread abuse of this, e.g people “relocating” their accounts to Asia).

Conclusion

Obviously there are way more important things than renewing elite status, but this is nonetheless a very gracious gesture by Singapore Airlines.

If you received one of these emails, please sound out below with whatever data points you’re able to share- useful information may include your status, how many years you’ve held it, when your membership year ends, whether you were based in Singapore and how close (or far) you were from re-qualifying.

Aaron Wong
Aaron Wong
Aaron founded The Milelion to help people travel better for less and impress chiobu. He was 50% successful.

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K Ho

Hi Aaron,
I lost my SQ*G status last September, and will get it back end of February when i complete my upcoming trip. This means my new SQ*G status will probably only start in Mar 2020. Bearing in mind the COVID-19 situation, I might not be able to accumulate enough miles for the forthcoming membership year. Do you think that will be extended as well?

K Ho

Update : I did not manage to complete my upcoming trip, it was to Seoul and had to cancel that as well. Now that I will be travelling to Australia in March, I have appealed to SQ to extend my end Feb elite miles expiry for another month, they have yet to reply. Let’s see…..

Ben

Give this man a WMF set.

Ben

SQ did a similar move during the SARS outbreak. No point losing loyal customers in such circumstances if nobody is flying.

Mark Lim

Would be nice if they extended the expiry of KF miles too.

Yiwei

Krisflyer Silver for a few years already, current membership year was ending in Feb 2020. I’m about 4.1k miles away from renewal and received the email for 1 year extension last week~~

D

KF gold with window closing end Feb. I requalified at the start of Feb based on flight miles and did not get an email.

Jessica

Shangri-La has also extended the membership tier by a year. My 1st year jade status is ending Dec 2020 and got extended to Dec 2021.

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