The world's longest flight will return to Newark Airport (EWR) on October 11, covering a distance of roughly 9,500 miles with just under 19 hours of flying time. Singapore Airlines will operate the flight to Changi Airport (SIN) with its two-cabin Airbus A350-900ULRs, with just 161 seats in total — 67 in business class and 94 in premium economy.
Premium-economy awards have been plentiful, and fares have been cheap, but those coveted business-class seats have commanded a higher redemption level of 135,000 miles each way — until now.
As reported by svenblogt, Singapore Airlines seems to have opened the saver-award floodgates, offering up tons and tons of business-class seats on the airline's new flagship flight, beginning on October 16, just a few days after launch.
Given the popularity of this key business route, I wouldn't expect to see many dates with even one saver seat open, let alone six!
In fact, I searched for a bunch of random dates between the flight's launch in October and the end of the schedule in July 2019, and came up with a whole bunch with 6+ open seats. Here's a flight in January with six seats, for example:
And another near the end of the schedule, on July 3, 2019:
There's plenty of space on the return leg, too, from Singapore back to Newark:
And of course there's saver space in premium economy, as there has been in the past. At 70,000 miles for premium and just 22,000 more for biz, I'd definitely splurge for business class — with some 19 hours on the plane, that works out to roughly 1,000 more miles per hour. A small price to pay for a lie-flat seat.
While this isn't my favorite Singapore business seat — that, you'll find on the new Boeing 787-10 — the A350 seats are decently comfortable, especially if you happen to snag a bulkhead row.
The one downside is that Singapore doesn't release these premium awards to most of its partners — you can't book with United MileagePlus, for example — but there are plenty of options for boosting your KrisFlyer account to book directly, as explained in this post.
That's because KrisFlyer partners with all four transferrable currencies — Amex Membership Rewards, Chase Ultimate Rewards, Citi ThankYou and Starwood Preferred Guest. Points transfer at a 1:1 ratio from all four programs, though you’ll need 3 Marriott points for every KrisFlyer mile once the program combines with SPG on August 18.
