Complete Guide: KrisFlyer Access Awards

Singapore Airlines introduced Access awards on 1 November 2025, along with revised Saver and Advantage award pricing as part of the 2025 KrisFlyer devaluation. Access awards allow KrisFlyer members to redeem seats even when Saver and Advantage awards are sold out— right down to the very last seat, if necessary.

That flexibility comes at a cost, however. Unlike traditional Saver and Advantage awards, Access awards use dynamic pricing, where the mileage requirement depends on demand and seat availability, rather than a static award chart.

So how many miles will you need? Well, that’s the thing. With dynamic pricing, the price is “whatever we say it is!”

The lack of transparency with Access awards is a feature, not a bug. Because there is no published award chart, Singapore Airlines has complete discretion to adjust prices as and when they please, as seen in March 2026, when rates were quietly raised by 3-10% across the board. 

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 an additional 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).

These are only available for flights operated by Singapore Airlines, and exclude Scoot or other airline 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 award availability. That’s reassuring in theory, though also difficult to verify from the outside.

The rules governing Access awards are largely similar to those of Advantage awards:

• 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 a published award chart. 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 seat on a Singapore Airlines flight available for commercial booking, you will be able to book it through Access.

While expensive, 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 vary in fixed increments:

• For First Class and Economy Class, there is only one standard Access price that applies whether the entire cabin is empty, or whether there’s just a single seat left
• For Business Class and Premium Economy Class, the Access price depends on which commercial booking classes are left

To illustrate, here’s a snapshot of Access prices on 21 May 2026 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).

This shows us how the cheapest remaining Business Class fare determines the Access award price. 

• On SQ632, the cheapest Business Class fares are available in C, which matches Tier 3 pricing. This means the Access award costs 149,500 miles, 86% more than Advantage
• On SQ634, the cheapest Business Class fares are available in J, which matches Tier 2 pricing. This means the Access award costs 124,500 miles, 55% more than Advantage
• On SQ636, the cheapest Business Class fares are available in Z, which matches Tier 4 pricing. This means the Access award costs 166,000 miles, 106% more than Advantage

I want to emphasise that the structure could be changed at any time, without notice. It could get better (not likely!); it could get worse. To put it another way, Access awards are susceptible to stealth devaluations, because there’s no published award chart.

In fact, that’s exactly what happened in March 2026, when Singapore Airlines quietly adjusted the cost of Access awards, increasing prices by 3% in First and Business Class, and 10% in Premium Economy and Economy Class. 

Following that change, here are the latest (unpublished) Access award charts.

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. While this was enhanced to 1 cent per mile from July 2025, it still represents relatively poor 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 value):

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 per mile valuation that lies between Advantage and Cash + Miles.

But it doesn’t always hold. There may be situations where Cash + Miles can trump Access, especially 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 at 0.22 cents per mile, and somewhat incredibly, Cash + Miles offers the best value at 1 cent per mile! Mind you, in this case I’d sooner pay the cash fare than redeem miles.

When would you book Access awards?

There was quite a kerfuffle when Access awards started appearing online, which is understandable because of how eye-wateringly expensive they can be. 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 139,500 miles, or Business Class for 305,000 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 29% 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 (104,000 miles).

Peak periods

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

But if you make your redemptions early enough, before the cheaper 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 29% 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 just over 1.2 million miles (you’d have to do it in two separate bookings, as the website lets you book a maximum of five First Class award tickets at a time).

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

Conclusion

Access awards offer last-seat redemption availability, but given how expensive they are, they’ll be all but irrelevant to most KrisFlyer members.

That said, for those with substantial mileage balances, Access awards are an opportunity to redeem miles – at better rates than Cash + Miles – in situations where Saver or Advantage space is unavailable. 

The big problem with Access awards is the lack of transparency. Prices can be changed at any time without notice, and the fact that we’ve already seen one devaluation just four months after launch suggests that frequent adjustments should be expected. 

I personally don’t think I could ever cough up the additional miles required for an Access award, but hey, to each his own.

(Cover photo: Plane’s Portrait Aviation Media)