Opinion: Airlines Should Make It Easier to Find Award Seats, Not Harder

Singapore Airlines now deliberately prevents KrisFlyer members with low mileage balances from searching for award seats online.

If you have a low number of KrisFlyer miles in your account, you’ll now see this error message when trying to search for award seats on the Singapore Airlines website:

Singapore Airlines provided no warning before implementing this new, opaque requirement earlier this week. The current theory is that you need at least 1,500 KrisFlyer miles in your account to be able to search. But Singapore Airlines won’t actually say what the requirement is due to “internal security controls”. It could change, anyway.

Why I don’t like this

In case you haven’t already guessed, I’m not a fan of this change.

I consider it regressive as it reduces transparency. And it makes it harder for people who people who don’t yet have a large balance of KrisFlyer miles to find out why they should even bother engaging with the program.

Many legitimate KrisFlyer members do not keep a large balance of miles sitting dormant in their account because KrisFlyer miles expire after 3 years. Instead, many Australians keep their points elsewhere (such as a bank reward program, hotel loyalty program or Velocity) and transfer them into KrisFlyer as needed – so that those miles aren’t subject to KrisFlyer’s harsh expiration policy. It’s now harder for these members to find out whether it’s even worth transferring points into KrisFlyer.

Intentionally blocking access to award availability information also shows a lack of respect for people’s time. Without the ability to easily search for seats online, you now instead need to either:

• Try asking KrisFlyer’s AI chat bot
• Try your luck searching in the Singapore Airlines app (this still works for now, but may not into the future)
• Call the Singapore Airlines contact centre
• Ask on the AFF forum

Does the AI chat bot even work?

I tried using the “Kris AI” bot to find award availability on Singapore Airlines. It gave fairly vague answers, rather than detailing which specific flights have award availability and at what times.

I guess if you asked enough questions you might be able to get more detailed information. But this is a frustrating and time-consuming experience compared to simply searching for the route you want on the main website.

I also tried asking Kris AI about Star Alliance partner award availability. The chat bot failed quite miserably with that task. It simply told me that most routes I checked either had no seats or didn’t exist. When it did find a seat on one of the routes I asked about (between Frankfurt and Munich), it refused to give me any more information about the flight number, departure time or how much the taxes would cost. That’s critical information if I’m deciding whether or not to transfer points into KrisFlyer in order to book an award seat.

The impact on the Singapore Airlines call centre

Many KrisFlyer members will now have to resort to calling up to enquire about award flight availability.

Does Singapore Airlines really want its phone lines getting clogged up by people who are simply trying to do something that the airline is deliberately preventing them from doing themselves? And is this in any way a good member experience?

Will this even achieve the intended purpose?

Singapore Airlines told Singapore-based blog The Milelion that these “additional safeguards on KrisFlyer award search” are designed to “protect our systems from automated and repetitive search activity that can impact the user experience for our members”.

In other words, the airline is trying to prevent bots from scraping award availability data from its website.

KrisFlyer’s minimum mileage requirement should indeed make it harder for people to use burner accounts to log in and search for award availability – as many Singaporean customers of the HeyMax Award Companion tool had been doing. And, notably, Seats.aero is no longer working for Singapore Airlines searches.

Around the world, other airlines including Air Canada have also tried to prevent third-party tools from scraping their websites. But with limited long-term success.

The reality is, people will just find new workarounds. In 2026, trying to stop this is like playing a game of Whack-A-Mole. So, in the long run, this may not achieve much more than simply annoying a lot of people. Some of those people may choose to disengage with the KrisFlyer program because it’s become too hard to use.

Do any other airlines do this?

Lufthansa’s Miles&More program similarly does not allow members to search for award flights if they have fewer than 1,500 miles in their account.

A small number of other airlines will let you search, but won’t show you any details of the available award flights if you don’t yet have enough miles in your account to make that booking. Aegean Miles&Bonus is one example of this – although there is a workaround that is good enough. The Thai Airways website used to do the same thing but no longer does.

In 2026, this sort of thing is becoming increasingly rare.

The Singapore Airlines change bucks the trend

Most other airlines are now trying to make it easier to find reward seats. For example, Qantas released a Flight Reward finder tool earlier this year that makes it really simple to find available reward seats many routes. Qantas did this because it realised it’s good marketing to actively demonstrate to members how they can get value for their points.

Qantas also realised that many third-party tools were already doing the same thing anyway. In fact, Qantas even partnered with one of those third-party tools, Gyoza Flights, to create its tool.

Virgin Australia too made changes to its website earlier this year to make it easier for Velocity members to find available reward seats and compare pricing.

And Seats.aero now lets you easily find reward seats on around two dozen airlines including Emirates, Lufthansa, Turkish Airlines, United and Qatar Airways.

Some people might say that actively choosing to hide this information in 2026 makes it look like you have something to hide.

Will this increase award availability?

Not everyone is unhappy with this move from Singapore Airlines. Specifically, KrisFlyer members with lots of miles sitting in their accounts – who are unaffected – are probably quite pleased that it’s now harder for other people to find Saver award availability.

One could argue that this change actually benefits the members who are most engaged with KrisFlyer and/or who go to the effort of finding award availability in other ways. If fewer people can find the limited number of award seats available, this could result in better overall availability.

I just hope that KrisFlyer members don’t go out of their way to earn or transfer miles into their account, only to find that the award availability they expected to see isn’t there.