Say you’re planning on travelling from Australia to New York in Business Class. Did you know that you can actually save KrisFlyer miles by visiting an extra six cities and circling the globe? You can do this flying Singapore Airlines and its Star Alliance partners.
KrisFlyer is the frequent flyer program of Singapore Airlines. One of the best ways to use your miles is to redeem them for a Round The World (RTW) Award in Business Class or First Class.
How much does a KrisFlyer Round The World Award cost?
With a Star Alliance Round The Award, you can circle the globe and visit up to 7 cities up to 35,000 miles over a 12-month period. It costs 240,000 KrisFlyer miles in Business Class and 360,000 miles in First Class.
Here is a cost comparison of flying to New York or Europe return, and doing a RTW trip in Business or First Class:
| From | To Europe return | To New York return | RTW Award |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane/Adelaide/Canberra | |||
| in Business Class | 232,000 | 258,000 | 240,000 |
| in First Class | 326,000 | 334,000 | 360,000 |
| Perth/Darwin | |||
| in Business Class | 212,000 | 242,000 | 240,000 |
| in First Class | 285,000 | 320,000 | 360,000 |
You can check out all the KrisFlyer award charts here.
Why is the Star Alliance RTW ticket good value?
Of course, you could use cash to book a RTW ticket on Singapore Airlines and Star Alliance partners with a travel agent. That would start at ~$16,000 per person, jumping to $26,000 in First Class. That’s a huge amount of money!
A RTW award using KrisFlyer miles often offers better value than a simple one-way or return award redemption. For example, if you wanted to fly from the East Coast of Australia to New York return, it will cost you 258,000 KrisFlyer miles in Business Class or 334,000 in First.
In comparison, the RTW award costs 240,000 miles in Business Class and 360,000 miles in First Class. Therefore, by paying 18,000 miles less in Business Class or 26,000 miles more in First, you can fly around the world!
Having said that, you may only want to have a holiday in Europe or the US because you don’t have time for a RTW trip. In that case, read our guide to maximising KrisFlyer redemptions by using free or additional stopovers.
Why shouldn’t I save my miles and just use them on more Economy Class flights?
It’s absolutely your prerogative to spend your miles as you see fit. A RTW Award in Economy Class costs 180,000 miles. Generally, however, you will get the maximum value out of your points by using them for premium cabin travel.
Can I book a round-the-world trip with Velocity Points?
Velocity doesn’t have its own RTW Award. However, you can transfer your Velocity Points to KrisFlyer miles at a ratio of 1.55 Velocity Points = 1 KrisFlyer.
That means that for Velocity members, the redemption in this guide will set you back 372,000 Velocity Points in Business Class or 558,000 in First Class.
Where can I fly on a KrisFlyer RTW Award?
Here are two examples that keep to the 35,000-mile maximum:
Example 1
Sydney – Tokyo on ANA // Tokyo – Toronto on Air Canada // Toronto – New York on Air Canada or United // New York – Rio de Janeiro on United // Rio de Janeiro – Lisbon on TAP Portugal // Lisbon – Istanbul on Turkish Airlines // Istanbul – Bangkok on Turkish Airlines // Bangkok – Sydney on THAI
Example 2
Sydney – Seoul on Asiana // Seoul – Los Angeles on Asiana or United // Los Angeles – Vienna on Austrian // Vienna – Istanbul on Turkish Airlines // Istanbul – Johannesburg on Turkish Airlines // Johannesburg – Singapore on Singapore Airlines // Singapore – Melbourne on Singapore Airlines
You can use the excellent Great Circle Mapper tool to calculate the total distance for your trip.
Which Star Alliance airlines can I fly on?
You can choose from over 1330 destinations in over 190 countries covered by the Star Alliance network. It is made up of 27 partner airlines, including Singapore Airlines, Air Canada, ANA, SAS and United.
All of the airlines have Business Class but only four have First Class for this award. They are Air China, ANA, Singapore Airlines and THAI.
I’m leaving Lufthansa out of this because they only release First Class award seats to their partners 15 days before departure. For this award, you’ll need to book further in advance. Furthermore, SWISS only lets its own elite status members book First Class travel.
Also, note that Air New Zealand is notorious for having poor award availability in Business Class.
As Virgin Australia is a KrisFlyer partner but not a Star Alliance airline, you cannot include Virgin Australia flights in this award.
Fuel surcharges on a Singapore Airlines Round The World Award
KrisFlyer does not impose fuel surcharges on award redemptions on trips featuring only Singapore Airlines flights. However, they will be imposed on both Singapore Airlines and partner flights as you will be flying on a combination of those airlines.
Here are some examples of taxes and surcharges:
- Sydney to Frankfurt in Singapore Airlines First Class: AU$365
- Frankfurt to New York in Lufthansa Business: $272
- Tokyo to Los Angeles in ANA Business: $42
- Seoul to Chicago in Asiana Business: $7
The rules
- As with all redemptions, the RTW award is subject to availability of award seats on Singapore Airlines and its Star Alliance partners
- You must travel in a continuous eastbound or westbound direction–that means no backtracking
- The journey must begin and end in the same country. However, you are allowed an origin open-jaw in the same country. So you can depart from Melbourne and return to Sydney, for example
- You must make only one crossing of the Atlantic Ocean and only one crossing of the Pacific Ocean
- Your total travel distance must not exceed 35,000 miles. You are allowed a maximum of 16 segments (meaning individual flights) and 7 cities
- You may stopover only once in each city and no more than twice in any one country
- Additional stopovers cannot be purchased
- Surface sectors are permitted but will count as stopovers. For example, if you land in Paris, take the Eurostar train across The Channel and fly out of London, that is counted as two stopovers–be careful
- No changes of flights/dates are allowed once your journey has started
How do I book a RTW Award with KrisFlyer miles?
- If you want to fly on Singapore Airlines, search for availability on the KrisFlyer website
- For all other partners, search for availability on United’s website
- Phone KrisFlyer (while you can usually book a KrisFlyer award online, this type can’t be)
We have more details in our guide on how to search for award space most efficiently.
Like other award redemptions, seats are subject to availability. There is a chance you will not be able to fly on the dates you desire, so you need to be flexible.
It is best to search one flight at a time as if it were a one-way journey, e.g. Sydney to Singapore, Singapore to Tokyo, Tokyo to Toronto.
Note that in order to redeem the award for the purpose of the RTW, the availability must be classified as a Saver Award. That’s because seat availability under Advantage/Everyday Award categories cannot be booked under RTW.
Have a notepad handy because when you find the available flights, you have to provide the information to the Singapore Airlines agent on the telephone. Not all agents are knowledgeable about this award, so you may have to hold their hand through this process.
Speaking from personal experience, these five handy tips will save you a lot of hassle. Write down the following:
- Date/s with available seats (e.g. 2 and 7 March)
- Origin and destination airports (Perth to Singapore)
- Airline (Singapore Airlines)
- Flight number (SQ 252)
- Departure and arrival time (10pm to 8am)
How do I earn KrisFlyer miles?
The great news for travellers in Australia is that KrisFlyer miles can be earned relatively easily. It is a transfer partner of several credit cards.
Summing up
The KrisFlyer Star Alliance Round The World award represents great value compared to both cash tickets and simple one-way or return routings. That’s provided you can find the award space on the dates and routes that you are looking at.
Do you research of award availability before you phone KrisFlyer to save time. Try to aim to fly airlines that have lower fuel surcharges. And be aware of the low number of Star Alliance airlines offering First Class; it might be best to stick to Business Class.
If you’re looking to use another points currency, Qantas and Asia Miles also offer round-the-world awards.
This guide was co-written with Nelson Yap.
I think next time I will spend the extra points and holiday for a longer period of time in the one location! Far more convenient and much less hassle that’s for sure.
It has taken me several weeks to wait for flights to become available, to navigate the partner airlines and address the multitude of barriers thrown up at every point.
After much pulling of hair from my head I have finally settled on a suitable itinerary (version 32 from my original), and reached out today to start the booking process.
(I thought this would be the easy bit!)
Upon calling I am continually prompted to enter my PIN number , which I am happy to do, however without the ability to input my membership number, I gave up after about twenty tries.
I managed to finally get through on an international number, after thirty minutes I gave up as the lady trying to assist me was struggling too much.
I was advised to send everything through by email via the feedback page and hopefully they will call me in hour days.
Hopefully the flights I have waited for are still available etc etc.
Who else wishes for the days where you could call someone and get them to assist?
Press #36 then # 945 if you agree
Thanks
Has anybody actually made this thing work? I can’t seem to find (looking 330 days out) any way to cross the Pacific that doesn’t create a dogleg from the Australian east coast (bne for what it’s worth) because Japan is as far east as international airports in Asia go – and its still west of Au. There are no Star Alliance airlines flying trans-Pacific with any business saver seats ever offered other than via Asia so it just can’t be done as far as I can tell. Is this something that has only ever worked when the agent makes a mistake and allows a dogleg? I’ve been able to find availability travelling west to get to Europe various ways – and on to North America. But leaving North America to get back to Australia seems impossible?
The Star Alliance RTW trip finder and United are useless. The only way to try and determine availability is via the Singapore Airlines site using the award flights search option
You can only choose the ‘Saver’ option – which is almost always wait-listed for upwards of a year moving foward
Availability is practically non-existent for popular sectors for the next year. e.g. the first available flight from Australia to the US in the Saver option is April 2019 !
The only partner airline that has come up in any of the hundreds of searches I’ve done is Turkish Airlines from Rome to Singapore.
So, we wanted to do Sydney to New York, New York to Rome, Rome to Singapore and Singapore to Sydney. Sounds simple ? Not possible within the next year, even after that we cannot get dates that will work. So, we’ve given up and will book a combination of individual reward flights.
I’m planning mine 12 months from now.
We’ve called up Singapore Airlines and have run into a couple of issues with finding availability despite seeing options via either Singapore Airlines or United Search tools, i.e. the agents can’t see the availability we can see on those sites.
We are also challenged in that we are looking to complete trip from Oct to January upcoming, which means that some flights will be tight on availability.
Do you have any suggestions for:
1) Searching for availability such that it lines up with what the agents will see in their system and
2) whether it makes sense to reserve seats in economy where no business rewards available at the start and then check at a later stage whether business availability opens up?
Thanks a lot in advance and look forward to hearing from you
Knowing that First is probably the same as Australian Business, do they allow First on this sector or are you back to Economy
Thanks!
I can probably take off for only 30 days or so. Is that realistic to get RTW scheduling for ?
Since the max is 7 cities (and not countries), if I land in Paris and wanted to tour most of Europe, are you saying I should take the next segment to start from Paris ?
Which direction is easier to book for ? Going east or west ?
Thanks ahead for your answers.
It seems to me, if your entire journey (40-50 days) must all be booked at once, that RTW could never be successfully booked. The only way success can happen, as I see it, is establish start date; when that becomes available – book it; then for flight #2, when that date rolls around, book it; and so on. If that is not possible, how on earth can a RTW ever be booked?
It would be fascinating to hear from anyone with any successful experience. For what it is worth, I was trying business class RTW:
San Francisco
Montreal
Frankfurt
Dehli
Bangkok
Auckland
Honolulu
San Francisco
And, I found appealing availability, if all flights happen on the same day. But, since I actually wanted to visit these places, the journey is strung out and I have not learned how to accomplish that.
1. I like to hear an update for your situation.
2. I wonder if we should all start up our own google group !
CBR-SIN-LHR,EDI-IST-JFK-BOG-LIM-SJO-CUN,LAX-HND-ICN-SYD.
backtracking from LHR-EDI, EDI-IST. ICN-SYD is technically backtracking too.
amazing value for money overall. Only thing SIA was concerned about was the total mileage.
Itinerary is:
MEL-SIN-CMB
CMB-SIN-IST (agent said this is backtracking when we called back but another agent had already approved the itinerary when we called the day before?!?)
IST-LIS
LIS-DSS
DSS-IAD-YYZ
YYZ-SFO
SFO-HNL
HNL-ICN-SIN-MEL (waiting for flight to open for booking)
We were able to identify seats in business except for IAD-YYZ and SFO-HNL, trip will be near end of year so understandable but will continue to look for availability to open up.
Really somewhat maddening process but hope we get there in the end.
Just wondering if it would be possible to book a seat in J as part of an F RTW ticket? Also, if this was done with Lufthansa or SWISS, would it be possible to later upgrade this back to F? Cheers.
Thanks.
Thanks for the article. I do have a question about the routing. Say you are in Perth and fly out west to Singapore and onto Europe and then on the way back from the US you go to Tokyo, are you able to go from Tokyo to Singapore and then back to Perth? As the East/West doesn’t quite make sense in that scenario. But (correct me if i’m wrong) the only star alliance flights that leave/arrive in Perth is Singapore, Bangkok, Johannesburg and a New Zealand city (but not counted as you said it is hard to get availability). And even if you choose to fly out from Perth to Singapore and go West, on the way back say you went from Tokyo to Bangkok and Bangkok to Perth, both Singapore and Bangkok are West of Perth and the routing is not strictly in a West direction.
Also is there any limit with layovers as opposed to stopovers?
Thanks again!
I’ve never booked a flight from Perth so I don’t have that experience, and you would have to double check with Singapore on that. As far as I can tell, your first itinerary is in the one direction and crosses the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean once and flying back, Tokyo-Singapore-Perth should not be a problem.
The Eastbound or westbound scenario doesn’t mean it is east/west of your home city, it just means the direction you are flying in, imagine it is like a one-way street, you choose the direction at the start, left or right, but after you start pick the direction, you have to go in that one-way direction and in a circle to return to your starting position.
As long as a layover is 23 hours and 59 minutes, it would not be counted as a stopover.
In my experience booking from BNE, you wouldn’t be able to fly west from SIN to Europe after having flown east from PER-SIN. This was very strictly imposed on me, but I was never able to get to the bottom of whether this was an accurate interpretation of the ‘continuous west/eastbound direction’ rule. It seems unnecessarily strict and over-zealous. But the only way to know for sure is to call them. See what they say. Either way, on the whole, I still think the 240,000 business class RTW award is great value. It just requires very very careful planning.
Cheers
Geoff B.
In my experience with SQ, their rules are very strict and there is no grey area. This is when the Qantas RTW comes in handy because it is more flexible, plus you can make changes after the journey has commenced.
Certainly there are trade offs, you can be more flexible by booking one-way award and limiting number of cities you can visit or use the RTW and must play within the routing rules.
For an extra 4,000 KF miles you have decide whether its worth it or not.
The agent even suggested Sydney-Singapore-Tokyo-New York-London-Singapore-Sydney was possible.
I will call SQ and double check again.
SQ agent said it was possible “zig zag” within the same continent to an extent. I’ll request another booking again and see what they said.
After being waitlisted with SQ for NYC return and with the removing of 15% discount (now 230k pts), it was only wise to try RTW-so i thought.
Never did I know that how many rules and how little availabilities were there for the places I wanted to visit and the airlines I deemed ok to fly with. e.g. I tried SQ, LH, UA, CA, none were available. I tried east to west and reverse directions, but i always hit road block here and there.
After spending weeks of planning, hours (each time) talking with SQ call centre (they call you back), I finally got my route:
Au east coast to Thailand to Germany to NYC to Taiwan back to AU east coast with TG, LX (LH economy), BR & SQ in business, surcharges and taxes $830aud.
BUT i m visiting Europe and NYC in not-so-interesting November. I could postpone it to April/May for a better season. But think of the process, I’d be rather experiencing boring November than going through it again…
My take aways: United site definitely helped heaps (probably the only good thing about them), along with star alliance for reference only.
Seats do go quickly for sure, so once you know what to book, get the miles and money ready. Of course if you are not picky about route and airlines, and dates are flexible – unlike me, you will find it much easier to fly RTW. SQ guys were brilliant! That you call it service!
If you want the Throne seat on LX, they charge you 🙂 You can always sit next to them and stare at them and whoever sit in there…the whole trip.
I’m in the midst of planning an RTW and the dates and flights aren’t exactly my first choices. But for 4,000 miles extra, its hard to beat.
If i were to book one-way for each of these tickets, even utilising the stopover $100 price, this would cost me around 400,000 points.
There are restrictions with the RTW award and not something that works for everyone.
Sometimes you will not get seats on the most direct route and might have reroute and fly via a different city on a different airline.
If you are travelling for 12 months, you are probably better off booking one-way awards because normally airlines don’t open their award calendar beyond 11 months from today.
And Krisflyer does not allow changes to an itinerary once your journey has started.
This guide isn’t the answer for everyone because there are pros and cons to one-way awards vs RTW.
Flexibility, point to point, and more points vs. certain restrictions, more cities, less points.
We have to work out the trade offs.
I’ve booked RTW before and like any award seat, you need to be flexible.
Right now I’m booking my own rtw and I’ve had to leave a few days before my desired date, and then I’ve had to stay in a few cities a few days longer/shorter because of availability.