SIA: New search restrictions to combat “automated and repetitive search activity”

If you’ve been trying to search for award redemptions on the Singapore Airlines website this week, you may have run into a roadblock.

It used to be that anyone could create a KrisFlyer account and start looking for awards immediately. That’s no longer the case, thanks to a new requirement that blocks members with insufficient miles from running searches.

While this is highly unlikely to affect anyone who uses KrisFlyer as their primary frequent flyer programme — and might even prove to be a net positive — it does have implications for those who only transfer in miles when they spot a redemption opportunity, as well as automated award search tools.

What’s going on with KrisFlyer award searching?

If you’re out of the loop, here’s a quick recap of what’s going on.

Earlier this week, SIA rolled out a new website restriction that blocks accounts with “insufficient balances” from performing award redemption searches, whether on Singapore Airlines, Star Alliance or other partner airlines.

Affected accounts will see an “Unable to proceed” error message, and be redirected to the AI-powered “Flight Recommender” tool instead. However, this only offers a high-level overview of award availability, and lacks the granularity needed to be truly useful. 

“Unable to proceed because your current miles balance is insufficient for flight redemption searches. To view available flights and the miles required, browse flight options.“

Now, it’s unclear what exactly the “activation threshold” is.

It was previously thought that 1,000 miles was the magic number, but recent reports suggest that even this amount is insufficient. It was also thought that activity in the past 15 months was the requirement to enable searching, but this has since been debunked.

The latest data I have suggests that 1,500 miles is the minimum requirement. Some believe this figure was chosen because it’s the cost of the cheapest possible KrisFlyer award — a Scoot flight to Malaysia — though I’m skeptical of this theory, given that (1) you don’t search for Scoot award flights on the SIA website anyway, and (2) during Spontaneous Escapes, the cheapest possible award cost drops to 1,275 miles.

I’d also like to highlight that the situation is fluid, and it’s possible that SIA is experimenting with different thresholds to see the impact on search volumes and user complaints.

This restriction does not appear to affect members with elite status (a PPS Club member with a zero balance reported that he could search successfully), and the SIA mobile app offers a workaround, at least for now. There’s also nothing stopping you from calling up KrisFlyer membership services to enquire about award space, though this is obviously more time-consuming than simply searching online.

For what it’s worth, once you’ve exceeded the threshold requirement, you can search for awards that cost any number of miles. For example, this account with 1,985 miles can still search for Suites tickets to London.

Singapore Airlines’ response

I reached out to SIA for a comment, and a spokesperson confirmed the new restrictions in the following statement.

First, it’s no surprise that SIA has declined to explicitly disclose the criteria required to enable search access. However, it’s something that the community should eventually be able to figure out, given enough data points.

Second, it’s also unsurprising that SIA is attributing the changes to “automated and repetitive search activity”. Award search tools like Seats.Aero, Roame, and Point.me have existed for some time, but only recently added support for SIA (to be fair, many of these tools wouldn’t even be necessary if airlines simply invested more in improving their own search interfaces, but I digress).

The recent launch of the HeyMax Award Companion may have been the tipping point, however, given its relatively large user base in Singapore, and how forthright the company was with promoting the feature.

HeyMax’s tool also works differently. With Seats.Aero (at least when its KrisFlyer search actually worked), users are shown cached results. You could even argue this conserves server resources, because I can see at a glance that there are no award seats on a particular route for the entire month, rather than running 30 different searches to come to the same conclusion. 

The HeyMax Award Companion actually runs those searches, using a member-provided KrisFlyer account. So when it shows you data for 57 days, it’s because it’s actually gone and done 57 search requests. Multiply that by thousands of users, and that’s a lot more bandwidth used.

From what I’ve heard, SIA is far from pleased — and I imagine they’ll be even less amused when they learn that HeyMax was harvesting frequent flyer numbers, tiers, account balances, and search data (read their mea culpa here).

Imposing a minimum mileage requirement goes a long way towards throttling such activity because it increases the cost of scraping, and every burner account that’s closed down incurs a real-world cost. To put it another way: how many of you would dare to use your personal KrisFlyer account with the HeyMax Award Companion?

Now, I’ll freely admit to a fair bit of schadenfreude over this whole thing. Beyond scrapers, the ones most affected by this restriction are those who don’t use KrisFlyer as their daily driver, who transfer only the exact number of miles required for a redemption, and keep a zero balance otherwise. If you’re someone who regularly engages with the KrisFlyer programme through credit card accruals, Kris+, KrisShop, Pelago etc., you’ll almost certainly be unaffected. 

So from a purely selfish perspective, I really don’t mind this new restriction. It’s hard enough to redeem Saver awards these days, and if this reduces some competition by making SIA redemption seats harder to find without actually having a balance, I’ll take it  — though it has to be said that 1,500 miles (or whatever the actual figure is) isn’t much of a hurdle anyway.

And look, as with all things in the miles game, you win some, you lose some. I’m currently on the other end of the barrel with Qatar Privilege Club, following their new restrictions on redemption nominees. Since I use my account as nothing more than a temporary box to transfer miles — the same way some people use KrisFlyer — I’m not able to redeem tickets for more than one person until I credit a commercial flight. That’s a much more onerous requirement than simply maintaining a small miles balance.

It’s frustrating, sure, but their programme, their rules.

Conclusion

Singapore Airlines has implemented new restrictions which block members with insufficient balances from searching for award seats. The airline has declined to disclose the exact criteria, though the working hypothesis is that a minimum balance of 1,500 miles is necessary.

If you’re an active KrisFlyer member, then this shouldn’t even affect you. If you’re not, then a token one-time transfer to enable 36 months of searching (the duration those miles would be valid for) is hardly the worst barrier that a frequent flyer programme ever put up.