Complete Guide: KrisFlyer Access Awards

Singapore Airlines launched Access awards on 1 November 2025, alongside revised Saver and Advantage award pricing as part of the 2025 KrisFlyer devaluation.

Access awards allow KrisFlyer members to redeem flights even when no Saver or Advantage awards are left– right down to the very last seat, if necessary. Naturally, this comes at a price, and that price will vary. Access awards mark the introduction of dynamic pricing to KrisFlyer, where the cost of awards depends on seat availability, rather than a fixed award chart.

In this guide, I’ll explain how Access awards work, how pricing is determined, and when – if ever – it makes sense to redeem one. 

What are Access awards?

Access awards are a new redemption option which will appear alongside Saver and Advantage awards during the booking process (you might even see four award choices during Spontaneous Escapes, when Promo awards are available).

Access awards are only available for flights operated by Singapore Airlines, and exclude Scoot or other partners.

Singapore Airlines has taken pains to emphasise that Access awards are offered over and beyond existing Saver and Advantage seats, and will not reduce current availability. That’s reassuring in theory, though also difficult to verify from the outside.

In some ways, Access awards are similar to traditional awards (in particular Advantage):

• Date changes are free of charge
• Route, cabin, or award type changes cost US$25
• Cancellations cost US$50
• Not eligible to earn KrisFlyer miles, Elite miles or PPS Value
• Cannot be further upgraded with miles or cash, or the Advance Upgrade vouchers offered under the KrisFlyer Milestone Rewards and PPS Rewards programmes
• Taxes and fees must be paid in cash

However, unlike Saver and Advantage awards, Access awards are not priced according to an award chart (at least officially– more on that later!). Instead, the mileage requirement depends on:

1. Seat availability
2. Route
3. Seasonality
4. Cabin

This is otherwise known as dynamic pricing. When commercial tickets are more expensive, so too will Access awards. When commercial tickets are cheaper, Access awards will cost less– though never below existing Advantage levels.

Moreover, Access awards draw from commercial seat inventory, which means they offer last-seat availability. In other words, if there is a Singapore Airlines seat available for commercial bookings, you will be able to book it through Access.

The usefulness of this should not be underestimated. It opens up the possibility of redeeming seats:

• at the very last minute, when all Saver and Advantage awards have been fully redeemed
• on flights where almost all seats have been sold out
• during peak holiday periods (e.g. cherry blossom season in Japan)
• on flights where redemptions are almost impossible to come by, or where only a fixed number of seats are released for redemption (e.g. Suites to London)

Last-seat availability also implies that Access awards are, in a weird sort of way, actually very egalitarian. Unlike Saver and Advantage awards, where Solitaire PPS Club and PPS Club members get access to extra inventory, all KrisFlyer members regardless of tier see the same number of Access awards.

How much do Access awards cost?

Here’s the twist: Access awards are not really dynamically priced– at least not in the traditional understanding of the phrase!

For example, just because one ticket costs S$500 and another S$550, doesn’t mean the Access award for the second will require 10% more miles.

Rather, it’s more accurate to say that Access prices will vary in fixed increments, depending on which commercial booking classes remain available.

To illustrate, here’s a snapshot of Access prices on 14 January 2025 from Singapore to Tokyo Haneda, in Business Class. 

And here’s the corresponding seat availability by fare classes (since we’re dealing with Business Class, look out for letters Z, C, J, D, U).

On SQ632, the cheapest Business Class fares are available in C, which means the Access award should cost 80% more than Advantage (80,500 miles), and indeed it costs 145,000 miles.

Likewise, on SQ634, the cheapest Business Class fares are available in J, which means the Access award should cost 50% more than Advantage, and that matches the displayed price of 121,000 miles.

For SQ636, the cheapest Business Class fares are available in U, which means the Access award should cost 25% more than Advantage, and that matches the displayed price of 100,500 miles.

In the case of First and Economy Class, it doesn’t even matter– there is one standard Access price that you pay, whether the entire cabin is empty, or whether there’s just a single seat left.

I want to emphasise that the structure could be changed at any time, without notice. It could get better (hahahaha); it could get worse. That’s the thing with dynamic pricing: the price is whatever the airline says it is!

To put it another way, Access awards are susceptible to stealth devaluations, because there’s no published award chart. Until then, however, here’s the unofficial Access award chart by zone. 

First Class

Business Class

Premium Economy Class

Economy Class

Are Access awards always better than Cash + Miles?

Singapore Airlines has long offered a Cash + Miles redemption option, where KrisFlyer members can use miles to offset any portion of their ticket (fare and taxes) at a fixed rate of 1 cent each. Needless to say, this is terrible value, and should be avoided as much as possible. 

But how does Access compare to Cash + Miles? Well, you might intuitively expect the following heuristic (in terms of mileage requirements):

Saver < Advantage < Access < Cash + Miles

This will pan out most of the time. Consider this example of a one-way Business Class flight from Singapore to London, with a cash fare of S$5,704.20. 

In this case, Access offers a redemption option that lies in-between Advantage and Cash + Miles. Obviously, you’d just book Saver or Advantage because they’re available for immediate confirmation, but if not then Access would be a far better option than Cash + Miles.

But it doesn’t always hold. While Access awards will always cost more than Saver and Advantage, they may not always be cheaper than Cash + Miles.

This can be the case when dealing with cheaper commercial fares. Consider this example of a one-way Economy Class flight from Singapore to Hong Kong, with a cash fare of S$173.20.

In this scenario, Access offers the worst value by far at 0.25 cents per mile, and somewhat incredibly, Cash + Miles offers the best value at 1 cent per mile (which says more about how poor the other options are than anything else)!

When would you book Access awards?

There was quite a kerfuffle when Access awards started appearing online, and that’s understandable. Access awards can sometimes be eye-wateringly expensive. Just look at this million mile redemption between Singapore and New York!

But while such screenshots make for good ragebait, they don’t accurately reflect the reality of the situation– that there would be no redemption options here in the first place if Access awards did not exist.

Still, if you’re the sort who would never dream of paying Advantage prices, then clearly Access will be all but irrelevant to you. However, if you’re willing to consider Advantage in certain situations, then there are some scenarios where Access might be worth considering.

Emergency bookings

Access awards can be useful in emergency situations where you absolutely need to fly at the last minute.

Suppose you have family in San Francisco, and because of some unfortunate circumstances, you need to be on the next flight out to see them. A one-way cash ticket would cost S$4,229 in Premium Economy, or S$9,599 in Business Class!

Since this is a last-minute booking, Saver and Advantage awards are all gone. But now that Access awards exist, you can redeem this flight in Premium Economy for 126,500 miles, or Business Class for 296,000 miles. 

Is that a lot to pay? Goodness me, yes. Is it a better idea to look for one-stop options with another carrier? Probably. But if you absolutely, positively have to be on this flight, then now you have an option that did not exist before.

“Skip the waitlist”

No one likes dealing with the uncertainty of the waitlist. Even after some mild enhancements in 2019, it’s still more or less a crapshoot. And as long as you’re waitlisted, you can’t really lock in other plans.

But the cheapest Business Access awards cost 25% more than Advantage. If you have the miles, you might see this as a way of skipping the waitlist altogether. Here’s an example from Singapore to Tokyo Haneda, where you can roll the dice with the Advantage waitlist (80,500 miles) or get instant confirmation with Access (100,500 miles).

Peak periods

There are certain peak travel periods like Christmas or Chinese New Year where you can forget about redeeming awards, unless perhaps you camp on the SIA website at 8 a.m 355 days in advance, preferably with Solitaire PPS or PPS Club status. 

But if you make your bookings early enough before the commercial fare classes start getting sold out, you should be able to snag the lower-tier Access awards. And as I mentioned in the previous point, these start from a 25% premium over Advantage.

It won’t be a fantastic redemption, but if you insist on flying on those particular dates, then that’s the cost.

Flex goals

I’m pretty sure this won’t apply to 99.99% of readers, but trust me when I say there are some people out there whose life goal is to book out an entire Suites or First cabin. 

Access awards finally make that possible. You could, if you were so inclined, have a private A380 cabin to Mumbai for slightly over 1.2 million miles (you’d have to do it in two separate bookings though, as the website lets you book a maximum of five First Class award tickets at a time– I wonder why!)

Realistically speaking, you’d probably try and book at least one in Saver, and one in Advantage, but everything else would likely have to be Access.

Conclusion

The introduction of KrisFlyer Access awards upends the familiar Saver/Advantage (and occasionally Promo) landscape, and while the prices may seem steep at first, it’s perhaps best to think of Access as an opportunity to redeem miles – at a better rate than Cash + Miles – in situations where Saver or Advantage space is unavailable. 

At the risk of stating the obvious, it would be sheer lunacy to book Access if Saver or Advantage awards are also available, so those two should always be your first port of call. 

Finally, keep in mind that the pricing structure of Access awards can change without notice. That’s a feature, not a bug– dynamic pricing isn’t meant to be transparent! However, it’s reasonable to expect Singapore Airlines to hold Access prices steady in the short term while it evaluates how members respond.

Have you noticed anything interesting about Access pricing or availability?

(Cover photo: Plane’s Portrait Aviation Media)