Singapore Airlines “Access” awards: Dynamic pricing finally comes to KrisFlyer

While Singapore Airlines’ upcoming KrisFlyer devaluation grabbed all the headlines earlier this week, there’s another development that’s equally worth paying attention to.

On 1 November 2025, the same day the new redemption charts come into effect, Singapore Airlines will add “Access” awards, a new category of award where mileage requirements depend on dynamic factors like seat demand and seasonality. 

With Access redemption, you will have an added option to use your KrisFlyer miles to pay and secure confirmed Singapore Airlines flight tickets immediately on your preferred flights as long as there are available seats. The number of miles required for seat confirmation will differ based on the demand for seats and may vary throughout the year.

-Singapore Airlines

The selling point of Access awards is that KrisFlyer members will be able to secure seats even when Saver and Advantage award space is unavailable. In fact, Access awards could get you the very last seat on a flight— for a price.

But there’s something about this that gets my spidey sense tingling, and not in a good way.

What are Access awards?

From 1 November 2025, Singapore Airlines will introduce a new type of award called Access, alongside the existing Saver and Advantage (and Promo) awards. This will only be available for flights operated by Singapore Airlines, and excludes Scoot or other partners. 

Unlike Saver and Advantage, Access awards will not be priced according to an award chart. Instead, the mileage requirement will depend on four factors:

1. Seat availability
2. Route
3. Time of year
4. Cabin

In other words, this is dynamic pricing. When the cash price of tickets increases, so too will the cost of Access awards (and vice versa, though there will obviously be a floor price that prevents it from dropping below existing Advantage levels).

Since Access awards draw from commercial seat availability, they will naturally be more abundant than Saver or Advantage awards. Also, they will be available for immediate confirmation, with no waitlisting required (or possible).

Where they’re similar to traditional Saver and Advantage awards is that Access awards do not earn KrisFlyer miles, Elite miles or PPS Value. They also cannot be further upgraded with miles or cash, or the Advance Upgrade vouchers offered under the KrisFlyer Milestone Rewards and PPS Rewards programmes.

Members will need to pay taxes and fees in cash, which means Access awards could be particularly unattractive for London redemptions, where the APD on a Business Class ticket costs a hefty £224 (set to increase to £253 in April 2026).

The fare conditions for Access awards will basically follow that of Advantage awards.

Are Access awards a good thing or bad thing?

The way I see it, there are three big unanswered questions regarding Access awards.

Will it take away space from Saver and Advantage awards?

Singapore Airlines has taken pains to emphasise that Access seats are over and above the seats available for award flights. In other words, Access will not cannibalise seats from existing Saver and Advantage awards.

There’s no reason to doubt what they’re saying, but also no way to verify it, because of the information asymmetry inherent in the situation. Moreover, it may be true now, but who’s to say that won’t change in the future?

To be clear: if Access awards are purely additive, then having an additional option never hurt anyone. But we’ll have to wait and see whether that’s really the case, and it won’t be easy to tell.

Will Access pricing be reasonable?

I realise “reasonable” is subjective, but we can at least agree that for Access awards to gain any sort of traction, they can’t be offensively expensive, the way Full awards were. 

Full awards? If you’ve been playing the miles game for some time now, you may remember that prior to May 2016, Singapore Airlines used to offer a category of awards known as Full — the running joke was that you had to be a “full” to redeem them (say it aloud). These offered last-seat availability, at a price.

How much? Here’s a sampling of one-way Full awards from Singapore (try not to gasp).

381,000 miles for one-way Business Class to New York? Goodness gracious me. The most expensive Full award topped out at an eye-watering 947,000 miles (First Class between Australia and Sao Paulo), probably the closest we’ll ever get to seeing a seven-digit figure on an award chart. Mind you, this was 10 years ago, when miles were much harder to earn!

Because of this, Full awards were more theoretical than anything else. I’m sure there must have been some who redeemed them, but for all intents and purposes they were irrelevant.

So how much should Access awards cost? Well:

• Access awards must cost more than Advantage, to reflect the increased availability
• Access awards must cost less than Miles + Cash, or else they add no value at all

To better scope this, I’ve compiled the Saver and Advantage prices for three popular destinations, in Business Class. I’ve also added the cost of a pure miles redemption using the Miles + Cash option, based on the lowest revenue fare I could find. 

This gives an idea of the range within which Access awards should fall. However, keep in mind that if load factors are high, then cheaper fares also won’t be available, and the Miles + Cash ceiling will be considerably higher.

With other programmes that use hybrid award chart/dynamic pricing, such as Air France-KLM Flying Blue, it’s not unusual to see one-way Business Class awards in the 300,000 – 400,000 miles range, and it’d be very concerning if the same fate befell KrisFlyer.

tl;dr: if you already cringe at the thought of paying Advantage, then Access will clearly not be for you.

Does it herald the arrival of more dynamic pricing?

In a best case scenario, Access awards stay around the edges, offering a third option for those who have more miles than they could ever spend. Traditional Saver and Advantage award space remains truly separate, and everyone plays in their own sandboxes.

But frankly, I doubt it will end there.

The reason so many of us are feeling apprehensive about Access awards is because it’s a playbook we’ve seen far too many times. Dynamic pricing is initially introduced on a limited scale, and positioned as a benefit that gives members more choice, at no detriment to regular awards. But over time, it starts to proliferate throughout the programme, until one fine day, traditional award charts are nowhere to be found.

So on the other extreme, the worst case scenario is that KrisFlyer follows this script by gradually shifting more and more traditional award inventory towards dynamic pricing, and in the long run getting rid of award charts altogether. If this really happened — and that’s a big if — then KrisFlyer would cease to be a meaningful rewards scheme, and more like a glorified cashback programme.

The problem I have with Access awards, and dynamic pricing in general, is that there’s just no transparency. What’s the price of an award? It’s whatever we say it is! The airline is hardly going to release the formula they use to calculate prices, or inform you when they tweak it, so fully dynamic pricing is basically carte blanche for unannounced devaluations. 

Award charts serve as a check and balance against such behaviour, but if they no longer exist, then all bets are off.

That said, I acknowledge this is a bit slippery slope-ish, and perhaps even an overreaction (overreactions?! on the internet?!?!). In all likelihood, we’ll end up somewhere in-between those two. 

I can’t see KrisFlyer going fully dynamic, the way Delta SkyMiles has done, but I also don’t believe that Access awards are just a flash in the pan. In time, we could very well see more of a dynamic element added to traditional awards, such as the implementation of peak periods where only the higher cost Advantage awards are available for redemption.

Conclusion

The introduction of Access awards marks the start of a new era for KrisFlyer, and one which makes me uncomfortable on many levels. 

It’s true that this could be much ado about nothing. But it’s also true that Access awards could be the backdoor for dynamic pricing, which will ultimately reduce the programme’s attractiveness and transparency. 

To be clear, Access awards can be of value, provided their pricing is kept within reasonable limits and they don’t cannibalise regular award space. If you’re flush with miles and don’t mind spending them this way, then more power to you. 

I suppose my unease is largely because of what I’ve witnessed with other programmes, where dynamic pricing is the unwelcome houseguest who eventually takes over the house. We’ve seen plenty of case studies of how insane dynamic pricing can get, and I wouldn’t want KrisFlyer to head down that route. 

Time will tell.

What do you make of the new Access awards?