Hi,
I'm sorry my first post is a bit of a rant (but really also a call for advice) and I'm sorry if I sound a little naive or ignorant but I'm quite new to redeeming mileage on international flights. I've only ever redeemed points for domestic flights and not very often! We did a big mixed class europe trip a few years ago on SQ and got around 60,000 miles in return. They were about to expire and we had always planned to use them so after doing a bit of calculation I decided to transfer 200,000 of my amex points over to krisflyer to book our family (2 adults, 1 child and an infant) a trip to LAX. Just went to book the flights and was hit with the extra surcharges of $2974.06 (2 adults, 1 child). The majority of this is the YQ surcharge...WHAT THE? I'm kicking myself for not hitting the 'continue' button to find out the surcharges before I transferred my 200,000 points from amex. I worked in the travel industry many years ago and I knew we'd be hit for the airport taxes etc but was not expecting anything like this. Are these surcharges only levied on award fares? I don't understand how they can get away with this? I can get a return ticket for $1111 on Virgin Australia at the moment (I get there's a difference in standard between the 2) or pay $991 in 'surcharges' on SQ to fly an extra 8 hours and 'costing' me 260,000 miles...that's $200,000 I spent on amex...to save $120 per person for a much longer/more painful flight. Am I missing something?
Does anyone have any tips on where/how we could use our krisflyer points to avoid such high surcharges? We really didn't want to spend $3000 on flights...in fact the only reason we were going was because we thought we weren't going to have to pay anything except the taxes for the flights and we didn't want to 'waste' the 60,000 points we had..
Thanks for listening...
arrgh I'm so depressed and angry....I just don't understand how they can justify this...
I'm sorry my first post is a bit of a rant (but really also a call for advice) and I'm sorry if I sound a little naive or ignorant but I'm quite new to redeeming mileage on international flights. I've only ever redeemed points for domestic flights and not very often! We did a big mixed class europe trip a few years ago on SQ and got around 60,000 miles in return. They were about to expire and we had always planned to use them so after doing a bit of calculation I decided to transfer 200,000 of my amex points over to krisflyer to book our family (2 adults, 1 child and an infant) a trip to LAX. Just went to book the flights and was hit with the extra surcharges of $2974.06 (2 adults, 1 child). The majority of this is the YQ surcharge...WHAT THE? I'm kicking myself for not hitting the 'continue' button to find out the surcharges before I transferred my 200,000 points from amex. I worked in the travel industry many years ago and I knew we'd be hit for the airport taxes etc but was not expecting anything like this. Are these surcharges only levied on award fares? I don't understand how they can get away with this? I can get a return ticket for $1111 on Virgin Australia at the moment (I get there's a difference in standard between the 2) or pay $991 in 'surcharges' on SQ to fly an extra 8 hours and 'costing' me 260,000 miles...that's $200,000 I spent on amex...to save $120 per person for a much longer/more painful flight. Am I missing something?
Does anyone have any tips on where/how we could use our krisflyer points to avoid such high surcharges? We really didn't want to spend $3000 on flights...in fact the only reason we were going was because we thought we weren't going to have to pay anything except the taxes for the flights and we didn't want to 'waste' the 60,000 points we had..
Thanks for listening...
arrgh I'm so depressed and angry....I just don't understand how they can justify this...