KrisFlyer's Devaluation: Your Miles Are a Wasting Asset

This move effectively unpegs the value of a KrisFlyer mile from a predictable "gold standard"—the fixed award chart—and allows it to float against the unpredictable currents of commercial demand. For the average person saving miles, this means the goalposts for their dream redemption are now constantly moving, creating a new and unwelcome form of financial risk where the purchasing power of their saved miles is guaranteed to erode over time.

Dynamic pricing shatters this certainty. The cost of an award flight is no longer fixed but is determined by a secret, constantly changing algorithm that weighs factors like cash fares, seasonality, and real-time demand. This "black box" approach has been implemented by numerous global carriers like Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, and the outcome has been consistently negative for consumers. Award prices become opaque and unpredictable, allowing the airline to enact stealth devaluations by simply tweaking the formula overnight without any public announcement. The question "How much does an award flight cost?" no longer has a fixed answer; it is whatever the airline's system decides it is at the moment you search.

This model also systematically eliminates the existence of "sweet spots"—the high-value redemptions that allowed savvy members to extract disproportionate value from their miles. Under the old system, a 13-hour flight to Cape Town in Business Class for just 56,500 miles represented a fantastic deal when the cash fare was over SGD 4,000. Dynamic pricing is designed to eradicate such opportunities. By aligning mile costs closely with cash prices, it transforms the KrisFlyer programme into little more than a glorified cashback scheme with a low and unpredictable yield. Your miles no longer unlock aspirational experiences at a fixed price; they simply provide a small, variable discount off a retail fare, fundamentally diminishing their value.

It also creates a lopsided proposition for members. When cash fares are high, the mileage cost of an award flight soars to astronomical levels, with one-way Business Class awards on other dynamically-priced airlines often exceeding 300,000 or 400,000 miles. Yet, when cash fares fall, preset minimum mileage levels, or "floor prices," often prevent members from snagging a true bargain. The system ensures the airline captures the upside of high demand while capping the consumer's benefit during periods of low demand.

This uncertainty fundamentally changes consumer behaviour, destroying the long-term loyalty that airlines claim to be building. The logical response for any financially prudent individual is to abandon the strategy of hoarding miles for a major future redemption. The risk that your accumulated miles will be worth significantly less in the future is now too high. This fosters a frantic "earn and burn" mentality, where members are incentivised to cash out their miles as quickly as possible for lower-value redemptions to avoid further devaluation. It also makes airline-specific co-branded credit cards less attractive compared to flexible bank reward programmes, which allow points to be held in a stable currency and transferred to multiple airline partners, offering a crucial hedge against any single programme's devaluation.

This gives rise to a new game of "points arbitrage." Instead of being a loyal saver, the savvy consumer becomes an opportunistic trader, keeping their assets with the bank until the moment of travel. They can then survey the landscape of multiple airline partners, compare the dynamically-priced redemption rates, and transfer their points only to the programme offering the best value for their specific destination and dates. This strategic shift fundamentally weakens the direct loyalty link to Singapore Airlines, transferring power from the airline's loyalty programme to the bank's more versatile rewards platform.

​While Singapore Airlines insists that Access awards are an additive option, the global precedent is clear. Dynamic pricing is a Trojan horse. It is introduced as a limited feature offering "more choice," but over time it expands to become the dominant system, cannibalising fixed-price award availability and ultimately replacing the award chart altogether. For the millions of Singaporeans with a KrisFlyer balance, the message is clear: the rules have changed, and your miles are no longer a safe investment for the future. The time to reassess your loyalty and your financial strategy is now.