Singapore Airlines Announces First Route For New Suites Class & Business Class

In the coming months Singapore Airlines will begin to take delivery of five new Airbus A380 aircraft, which will feature new Suites Class, business class, premium economy, and economy cabins. Eventually their existing A380s should be retrofitted with this product as well. Singapore Airlines is slow to make changes to their products, but when they do, they usually set the new industry standard. It’s my understanding that on their upcoming A380s they’re not just refreshing their existing products, but rather completely reimagining them.

In early September we learned that Singapore Airlines will be revealing their new products on November 2, 2017, so we’re just about a week away from getting all the details of what I suspect will be some of the world’s new best first & business class cabins. The airline claims that four years of development has gone into these products, so I can’t wait to see what they came up with.

Singapore’s current Suites Class

While we don’t yet have more details of the product, Singapore Airlines announced today when we can expect the new products. Per Singapore Airlines’ press release:

The first of the A380s with the new products will operate daily from 18 December as flight SQ221, departing Singapore at 2040hrs and arriving into Sydney at 0740hrs the following day. It will return as flight SQ232, departing Sydney at 1215hrs and arriving into Singapore at 1735hrs. Additional destinations for the new products will be revealed in the coming months.

Lucky me! I had guessed that SQ221/232 would be the first flights to get the new product, and in August I wrote about how I made speculative bookings on these flights in both Suites Class and business class for travel early next year. I have a total of two roundtrips booked — for one roundtrip I’m in Suites on the outbound and business on the return, while for the other roundtrip I’m in business on the outbound and Suites on the return.

There had been rumors that the new A380 product would only be introduced in 2018, so it’s great to see that the product will be available as of mid-December.

If you still want to redeem miles for these flights, the good news is that there’s a good amount of saver level business class award availability on SQ221/232, and they’re charging 58,000 miles one-way.

Unfortunately I don’t see any saver space available in Suites Class, though. However, the standard award rate (which is readily available) is 150,000 KrisFlyer miles, and that’s not that bad if this turns out to be an awesome product (which I’m sure it will be).

Keep in mind that when Singapore first introduced the A380 about a decade ago, they completely blocked premium cabin awards on the plane except at the “full” award level (which doesn’t exist anymore), so a roundtrip Suites Class ticket would cost you something like a million miles. So being able to redeem 150,000 miles one-way is a bargain by comparison.

There’s no guarantee they won’t take a similar approach with this product as they have in the past, though I’m inclined to believe that they won’t be blocking the cabins. That’s because I don’t think they’d announce the route ahead of actually announcing the product if they didn’t plan to increase pricing. But you never know, so if you want to snag a seat in the new product, you might as well lock it in ASAP.

I CAN’T WAIT!!!

(Tip of the hat to @WinstonPurnomo)