Just booked my first awards flight with SQ in March(JFK-FRA-SIN-MEL Business Standard for two pax for 306k points) and now wondering about what's the best practice for waitlisting. Have gone through quite a few threads on here and FT and just wanted to clarify some points:
1) if and when a waitlist clears, how long do you have to actually ticket it ie. spend the miles and pay the taxes on it to actually confirm a ticket, before it expires? Have seen answers from immediately to 3 days being mentioned, is this still correct? Have heard that if you call in to KF, you can get this timeline extended as well?
2) From what I gathered, it'll cost $30 USD to cancel a booked award flight. This will redeposit the points back into your account(possibly can be done immediately if done over the phone or take longer if done online?) and for the taxes to be refunded back to credit card. Is that understanding correct or am I missing any other fees? Also, is that $30USD per booking or per pax?
3) Related to question 1. I know you need the required amount of points to actually waitlist for rewards, but do they still clear if in the meantime, your points balance drops below the actual requirement?
eg. I have 100k points, I successfully waitlist a saver award that'll cost 100k points and then I wait. While waiting, I decide to book another award flight that'll cost 75k points, leaving me with 25k in points. Is there a possibility of the waitlist clearing even though I don't have enough in my balance to confirm the booking? Depending on how long before the cleared waitlist expires, I could either transfer in more points from my credit card or cancel one of my existing award bookings to get the points back to pay for the cleared waitlist flight.
I suspect the answer is Yes, as I've read a few threads where people have said that if you have enough points to either book/confirm a standard reward flight or waitlist a saver reward flight, to waitlist the saver reward flight first then book/confirm the standard reward flight as you can't do it the other way around because once you book/confirm the standard reward flight, you won't be able to waitlist another flight as you won't have enough points. Of course, that's assuming that people who've done it that way have actually had their waitlist cleared while in that situation, and they then subsequently cancel the confirmed flight to get the points back to confirm the now cleared waitlisted flight....
4) Currently I have the confirmed tickets for JFK-FRA-SIN-MEL Business Standard for two pax for 306k points, and I still have a balance of around 240k points. The option is there to waitlist Suites Saver equivalent for 233k points and also Business Saver for 182k. As I have enough points to waitlist both, I'm thinking thats something I should do? If either of them clears, then I can cancel the existing Business Standard seats I have and I'll get to experience either Suites(YAY) or Business for less points than I've already committed to paying for the flights. For a cancellation fee of 30 bucks of course.
2 Saver, 1 Standard.
