Scoot, the low-cost subsidiary of Singapore Airlines, is now offering to earn and redeem miles in Singapore Airline’s KrisFlyer loyalty program on every flight, without having to pay for extra packages! You earn for every dollar spent on Scoot tickets and can redeem them like cash for partial or full tickets on the airline! Read my review to find out if you should!
Scoot has offered “PerkPlus” packages in the past that included the earning of KrisFlyer miles, but the prices made it uninteresting for me. Things started to move when Scoot introduced their Insider membership earlier this year, allowing you to store your information, manage bookings and get discounts. They now allow you to also log in with your KrisFlyer account information and to synchronize your Scoot Insider and KrisFlyer accounts, making it possible to get the Insider benefits AND earn & redeem KrisFlyer miles on flights.
You earn 1 KF mile per Singapore Dollar (SGD) spent on Scoot air fares and add ons. That means you currently earn 1.33 KF miles per USD. I value KF miles at about 1.5 UScents/mile, so your reward rate is approximately 2%. That’s not great compared to other low-cost carriers. AirAsia BIG or Cebu Pacific GetGo offer significantly higher reward rates around 6%.
To redeem your KF miles for Scoot flights, you can book any Scoot flight online as usual and select to pay with cash or KF miles for any portion of your fare and add-ons.
Singapore Airlines values the KF miles in this example at about 0.7 US cents/mile – or roughly half of what I value them at, making this a terrible option for KrisFlyer redemptions.
Bottomline: Earning miles or points for any transaction is better than not earning and earning a valuable currency like SQ KrisFlyer miles on Scoot flights is a great, new benefit. The reward is not great, but better than nothing and I recommend to take advantage of it!
Redemption of KF miles on Scoot flights is a lot less attractive with a terrible miles value. I recommend to safe your KrisFlyer miles for a much more valuable redemption for Singapore Airlines First or SQ Business Class flights instead. But if you have some orphaned SQ miles with no chance to use them prior to expiration, this is another way to get at least some value out of them!