Business travelers and other frequent flyers will be able to fly more, but pay less with Singapore Airlines’ new flight passes for more trips.
Instead of booking one trip at a time, Flight Pass allows travelers to pre-purchase discounted bundles of tickets and determine the actual travel dates and book their flights later.
These advance purchase tickets can be converted into actual reservations as little as seven days before the trip, with anything from 12 flights to 40 flights over six months to 18 months.
Flight passes can also be shared, which means a company can maximize their savings by pre-purchasing a large number of flights over an extended period of time, which can be used by different employees as the need arises.
Buy now, fly later
The key feature of Flight Pass is its flexibility, says Singapore Airlines: travelers can “lock in discounted flights for multiple flights and decide their travel dates when it suits them, depending on available seats.”
The price of a Flight Pass package depends on a number of custom factors such as the number of flights, the travel period and how long in advance each booking is made, the type of ticket and of course the destinations.
Singapore Airlines launches its Flight Pass on flights between Singapore and the UK, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and South Korea, and says it will gradually expand to other destinations.
Singapore Airlines says it will expand the availability of Flight Pass beyond these seven launch destinations.
Travel must come from Singapore, and at present the airline pass is only available for economy class bookings – specifically Singapore Airlines’ Lite, Standard and Flexi economy fares.
Each of these still has their usual characteristics, such as varying degrees of flexibility for flight changes and cancellations, and earns between 50% and 100% of KrisFlyer miles.
So far, Flight Pass is limited to economy rates.
It tells a spokesman for Singapore Airlines Executive Traveler that the airline “will review whether (Flight Pass) will be extended to other travel classes in the future.”
So how much can you really save?
Executive Traveler priced a Singapore-London flight through the usual booking procedure as well as in a Flight Pass package of 12 flights
The one-time price of a standard economy price for a return trip between Singapore and London in mid-February 2022 was SGD 2004.
The 12-flight package (six return flights) taken over a 12-month period, with a 30-day pre-booking, landed at SGD $ 1842 for a return trip.
It is without a doubt not a significant saving, although it is not to be fussed about keeping 12.5% of the travel budget in your pocket – and on six return trips, the savings increase to almost 1,000 SGD.
Customize your flight pass to favor savings or flexibility.
The theory is that the more you ‘create’ your Flight Pass – such as making multiple flights with a longer pre-booking window (to lock trips as regular customer meetings, attending conferences, and so on) – the lower the cost per flight. flight price.
It takes a lot to tinker with the Flight Pass website (provided through Singapore Airlines’ partner Optiontown) to customize your Flight Pass package, but you can get the price down to around SGD $ 1,200 for a return trip (SGD $ 600 per flight), if you are ready to buy many more flights under an Economy Lite price.
Of course, the biggest risk with any prepaid system – be it travel, movie coupons or even cups of coffee – is that you may not use all of your “credits”.
In the case of Singapore Airlines’ Flight Pass, there is no doubt no less flexibility than booking a single flight, but a single flight does not the roof could cost more overall than what you had hoped to save in the first place.
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