Alaska Airlines already partners with members of both SkyTeam and oneworld. Starting next month, the airline will partner with its first Star Alliance carrier: Singapore Airlines. But don’t get your hopes up about an incredible redemption in Singapore’s new Suites Class.
Stating on September 27, 2017 Singapore and Alaska will offer reciprocal mileage earning. That can be quite valuable if you credit your Singapore flights to Alaska since Alaska tends to be quite generous in awarding miles for flying on partner airlines. For example, fly business class and you’ll earn a 25% class of service bonus and an additional 100% bonus. That’s great.
But if you’re thinking you can redeem those Alaska miles for longhaul trips in Singapore business, first, or suites class, think again. Singapore is notoriously stingy in releasing award space to partner airlines and there is no reason to believe the partnership with Alaska will be any different.
You can still find regional business class space fairly easily. You can even find space between Australia and Singapore in business class if you are flexible enough. But longhaul flights? It’s like a needle in a haystack, if even that. That makes the new partnership only theoretically beneficial from redemption standpoint.
The good news is that Singapore economy and premium economy classes are among the best in the business and if you’re okay with that, you’re likely going to find longhaul space.
CONCLUSION
Even though you may not be able to redeem Alaska miles for premium longhaul travel on Singapore Airlines, Alaska has many other partners that present great redemption opportunities. This is a great new partnership in terms of broadening the ability to earn Alaska points. With each new partner addition, I must take a closer look at the value of giving Alaska Airlines more business.
I see the flip side benefit too – for folks who have the occasional AS+VX flight that can’t be banked to AA AAdvantage and don’t have a meaningful mileage balance at AS MileagePlan but do have one at SQ KrisFlyer, then they can bank that flight accrual onto SQKF instead.
i’ve been mostly banking my B6 and VX flights that way.
This was exactly my thought, and in fact when I emailed VX about their SQ partnership after the merger the response implied it would just switch over to AS. Thus, a way to top off KrisFlyer points if you fly AS.
I also expect that we won’t be able to redeem on the Frankfurt to New York flight, just like you can’t redeem on LAN’s mad-fra flight. I really like Alaska but really dislikes all the separate rules and restrictions that apply in different partners.
Agreed – my real problem are the route restrictions, not seat availability.
There is a long list of partners, but when you look at specific routes, many partner flights can’t be booked with Alaska miles at all. Let’s see what they offer on SQ come September 27th…
Now the question is will Alaska allow you to redeem for all regions on SQ or is it just the routes that touch North America. Big issue with their Emirates partnership- if the route doesn’t touch North America, you can’t redeem for it. Which is about 80% of their flights. Similar issues with JAL: Europe to Asia routes? Forget about it.
That’s an interesting perspective. I tend to only look at Cathay for redemption’s to Asia myself as the experience is incredible. I first viewed this a positive. I guess you are right though it is better for crediting flights to Alaska rather than redeeming.
I flew Etihad and credited to Asiana several times only to find out that Asiana did not credit those flights to Star Alliance Gold and only to my miles balance with Asiana. It makes a big difference if you want to accumulate miles toward status.
If I fly Alaska Air and credit to Singapore Kris Flyer will those miles count towards Star Alliance Gold status?