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Due to its “time-stamping” policy, Singapore Airlines has had little choice but to extend the validity of members’ miles during the COVID-19 pandemic. Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer miles normally expire after 3 years – regardless of your account activity. So, without the extensions, many KrisFlyer members would have lost their miles before they had a proper chance to use them.
Throughout the pandemic, Singapore Airlines has been extending the validity of expiring KrisFlyer miles by six months at a time. These extensions were due to end after this month. But “Kris-mas” has come early for KrisFlyer members, with Singapore Airlines announcing that it will continue to extend the validity of expiring miles by another six months.
KrisFlyer miles due to expire between January and June 2023 will now be extended for a further six months. They will now expire between July and December.
If you have miles that were due to expire this month (December 2022), they will still be extended until June 2023 and then extended one more time until December 2023.
Unused KrisFlyer miles normally expire in batches at the end of the month, three years after the month in which they were originally earned. (The expiration takes place at 23:59 Singapore time on the last day of each month, to be exact.)
As part of this latest announcement, Singapore Airlines is also further extending KrisFlyer Milestone Rewards until 31 December 2023.
KrisFlyer miles won’t be reinstated for cancelled award bookings
Unfortunately, there is a bit of a catch with this new policy. If you use your KrisFlyer miles to make a redemption booking, they will not be eligible for the final validity extension and will retain their original expiry date. This will apply even if you cancel your booking before the miles would have expired following the extra extension.
The Singapore Airlines website says:
Miles that have already been utilised for redemption will not be eligible for extension. If you have made a redemption booking and subsequently cancelled it voluntarily, any refunded miles will follow the date of expiry at the time of booking.
For example, if you had KrisFlyer miles due to expire in February 2023, and did nothing, their validity would automatically be extended at the end of February until August 2023. But if you used your miles to book a KrisFlyer award ticket in January 2023, but cancelled your booking in March, you would lose those miles.
KrisFlyer miles who’ve cancelled award bookings have already run into this problem, but have generally been able to get the miles reinstated upon request until now.
The final extension
Singapore Airlines has advertised this latest offer as “a final 6-month extension”. The use of the word “final” is more than likely deliberate and indicates that KrisFlyer does not intend to offer any more extensions after this one.
This wording was not used when announcing previous extensions.
This means that KrisFlyer miles would resume expiring from the end of July 2023. That is, unless Singapore Airlines decides to replace its outdated time-stamping expiration policy with an activity-based policy – as Singapore-based blog Milelion recently made the case for.
Virgin Australia has also placed a moratorium on the expiration of Velocity Frequent Flyer points until at least 30 June 2023. But unlike with KrisFlyer, Velocity members can easily stop all their points expiring by simply earning or redeeming at least one point every 24 months.
Join the discussion on the Australian Frequent Flyer forum: Expiring Krisflyer Miles – When can I travel?
