Singapore Airlines is one of the most popular and easiest airlines to travel hack, or fly using points or miles, thanks to being partners of the major transferable credit card programs- Chase, American Express, Citi, Marriott, and Capitol One. There are many ways to earn KrisFlyer miles, but the fastest way (other than flying Singapore Airlines or their partner airlines) is through credit card spending and sign-up bonuses. We’ll show you how to earn KrisFlyer miles so you can accrue enough for a reward ticket on Singapore Airlines, like that amazing Singapore First Class Suite.

We’ve flown Singapore Airlines Business Class numerous times by transferring our credit card points to Singapore KrisFlyer, the Singapore Airlines frequent flyer program. By redeeming KrisFlyer Miles, we paid only taxes and fees, which was a great value and saved us thousands of dollars. Singapore’s business class cabin offers a highly valuable KrisFlyer miles redemption.

Check out our reviews of Singapore Business Class 777-300ER from Hong Kong to San Francisco and Singapore to Frankfurt, the A380 from Frankfurt to NYC, the A330 from the Maldives to Singapore, and the A350 from Singapore to Hong Kong. Considering that Singapore Airlines ranked as the World’s Best Airline of 2018 and has won numerous other awards, it’s a great airline to fly with award tickets. We hope to fly in the new luxurious First Class suites for a future Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer redemption.

The Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer program is easy to figure out and the customer service team does a fantastic job helping you secure flights. First you need to join KrisFlyer (set up an account)  or if you’re already a Krisflyer member, just enter your Singapore KrisFlyer login information. It’s easy to redeem KrisFlyer miles online or via the 24/7 Krisflyer hotline for award flights with Singapore Airlines and their partners. The KrisFlyer phone number is +1 (800) 742-3333, which is toll free from the United States. Krisflyer customer service has been excellent in our experience, making the process to book award flights easy and pleasant. So, let’s get started on all the ways to earn KrisFlyer miles.

How to earn KrisFlyer Miles through credit cards

The best way to earn KrisFlyer miles is through credit cards. Singapore KrisFlyer is a partner of the major transferable credit card programs, which is why it is so easy to earn thousands of KrisFlyer miles through credit card spending and sign-up bonuses. Strategic spending and credit card stacking has earned our family enough miles for multiple long-haul business class flights on Singapore Airlines. Below are the main transferable credit card programs that transfer to KrisFlyer. The more you have, the closer you get to redeeming KrisFlyer miles for that dreamy first class suite. Our son tested it out when flying Singapore Business Class and didn’t want to give up his First Class seat.

American Express Membership Rewards

American Express Membership Rewards transfer to Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer at a 1:1 ratio and take up to 3 days to complete. From our past experiences, transfers took less than 24 hours and sometimes only a few hours to complete. If you need KrisFlyer miles for a quick booking, transferring from the AMEX membership Rewards gets you the miles faster than the other credit card programs. We’ve earned thousands of miles using our AMEX Platinum cards and AMEX Platinum Business cards, both of which also have generous sign-up bonuses.

Chase Ultimate Rewards

Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer to Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer at a 1:1 ratio in increments of 1,000 points and take 2 to 4 weeks to complete. You can earn Chase Ultimate Rewards through spending on several Chase credit cards. We recommend the Chase Sapphire Preferred, Chase Sappire Reserve, and the Chase Ink Business Preferred.

Citi ThankYou Rewards

Citi ThankYou rewards transfer to Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer at a 1:1 ratio. It takes 2 to 4 weeks to transfer citi miles to KrisFlyer Miles. You can earn Citi ThankYou miles through spending on The Citi Premier Card.

Capital One

Capital One Miles transfer to Singapore Airlines KrisFLyer at a 2:1 ratio and take 2 to 4 weeks to complete. You can earn CapitalOne miles through spending on the Spark Miles for Business, Venture and Venture One credit cards.

Marriott Bonvoy

Marriott Bonvoy points transfer to Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer at a 3:1 ratio. For every 60,000 Marriott Points you transfer, you receive an additional 5,000 bonus miles. The transfer takes 6 to 8 weeks to complete. However, prior to the Starwood Preferred Guest merger with Marriott, our transfers took 5 business days on average.

If you are trying to secure an award ticket and are worried that you may not get the miles in time, you may want to transfer from another credit card program first or give yourself enough time to deal with potential transfer issues. You can earn Marriott Bonvoy points through spending on the Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant American Express Card and The Marriott Bonvoy Boundless card from Chase.

Earning KrisFlyer miles through hotel stays

You can also earn Singapore Airlines miles through hotel stays at partnering hotels or hotel stays booked through KrisFlyer partners including Agoda.com and Kaligo.com. You can access the full list of hotel partners, but some of the highlights from Singapore Airlines’ partners include IHG, Hyatt, Marriott, Radisson, Anantara, and Alila.

You must join the hotel’s loyalty program and then provide your KrisFlyer number when making the reservation and your KrisFlyer membership card when checking in. It typically takes 6-8 weeks for the KrisFlyer miles to credit to your account. Most of the partner hotels offer 500 KrisFlyer miles per eligible stay, or up to 2 KrisFlyer miles per $1 spent. Frequent hotel stays can help you earn thousands of extra miles to get you closer to that KrisFlyer award ticket.

Convert hotel points to Singapore Air KrisFlyer miles

If you’re rich in hotel loyalty points, you can also transfer points from Hilton, Radisson, Fairmont, and other participating hotels to KrisFlyer points. For example, you can convert 4,000 Hilton Honors Point to 500 KrisFlyer miles and 10 Radisson Reward points to 1 KrisFlyer mile. If you have so many hotel points that you don’t know what to do with them, this is a good way to put them toward an award flight.

Boost earnings with Rocketmiles

If you anticipate spending often on hotel stays, especially if you are a frequent business traveler, then you can use Rocketmiles to earn even more KrisFlyer miles. Rocketmiles is an online booking website where you can earn tens of thousands of miles from 60 participating loyalty programs by booking hotel stays within their portal. Depending on your booking, you may earn over 10,000 miles per night. We earned around 85,000 bonus miles thanks to RocketMiles.

Those miles would have been enough miles for a business class saver award flight from Frankfurt to JFK with the Singapore Airlines A380. We also could have used those miles to secure 3 Business Class Saver Award tickets from Singapore to Hong Kong aboard the Airbus A350. 

Keep in mind that when booking hotels through Rocketmiles, you won’t earn hotel points and will not be eligible for elite status benefits at the hotel. However, we’ve been fortunate several times to call the hotel after booking and provided our loyalty program number, and the hotel kindly extended our elite status benefits anyway. It never hurts to ask and you may be pleasantly surprised.

Otherwise, you have to weigh the pros and cons of booking directly through the hotel to earn hotel points and elite status benefits (and possibly up to 500 KrisFlyer miles), versus booking through Rocketmiles to earn way more miles. Rocketmiles tends to be very popular with business travelers who aren’t paying for their hotel stays out of their own pocket. Their website claims that most frequent business travelers earn an average of 80,000 miles per year through their program.

Earning KrisFlyer miles through car rentals and ground transport

You can earn up to 500 KrisFlyer miles per rental by booking a rental car or ground transport through one of KrisFlyer’s ground transport partners. Partners include Avis, Hertz, Europcar, Sixt, Rentalcars.com, EasyRentCars.com, Blacklane, Conxxe, and Grab. You can learn more here.

Earn KrisFlyer miles by flying Singapore Airlines or its partners

The most obvious way to earn KrisFlyer miles, although the least appealing for travel hackers who don’t like to pay for flights, is by flying Singapore Airlines on eligible fares. Check out the Krisflyer miles calculator to find out how many miles you can earn when flying Singapore Airlines on paid flights.

You can also earn KrisFlyer miles by flying any of Singapore Airlines’ partners on eligible fares. Singapore Airlines is a Star Alliance member, which includes Adria Airways, Aegean Airlines, Air Canada, Air China, Air India, Air New Zealand, ANA, Asiana Airlines, Austrian Airlines, Avianca, Avianca Brasil, Brussels Airlines, Copa Airlines, Croatia Airlines, EGYPTAIR, Ethiopian Airlines, EVA Air, LOT Polish Airlines, Lufthansa, Scandinavian Airlines, Shenzhen Airlines, South African Airways, Swiss International, TAP Portugal, Thai Airways International, Turkish Airlines, and United. So that gives you several more ways to earn Singapore Krisflyer miles by flying with Singapore Airlines alliance partners.

Singapore also partners with airlines outside the Star Alliance, including SilkAir, Scoot, Alaska Airlines, JetBlue, Virgin America, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Australia and Vistara. Flights with Singapore Air or SilkAir earn tier bonus miles on top of the actual miles flown. Check KrisFlyer mileage accrual levels when flying Singapore Airlines and KrisFlyer partner airlines.

We know some frequent business travelers who have earned tens of thousands of miles from international business class flights, paid by their employer, and then used their KrisFlyer miles for dream vacations on their personal time.

Earn Singapore miles by shopping

You can also earn KrisFlyer miles by shopping online via KrisFlyer Spree, which includes over 2,000 brands, including Macy’s, LivingSocial, Ray-Ban and many more. You can earn miles for every $10 spent. You need to login to KrisFlyer Spree with your KrisFlyer login information and then click “Shop Now” to be directed to the merchant’s website. Once your purchase is approved, your KrisFlyer miles will be credited to your account within 7 days. If you already plan to make some purchases from their online shopping partners, you might as well earn some Singapore miles for it.

Can you buy KrisFlyer miles?

If you find yourself slightly short of the number of miles you need for an award ticket that you are ready to book, you may be wondering if you can buy KrisFlyer miles to top off your account. Although you cannot technically purchase KrisFlyer miles from Singapore Airlines, you can purchase your ticket with a combination of miles and cash, or what they call a “miles top-up fee”. However, we don’t recommend buying KrisFlyer miles because it is not a good value at $40 (US dollars) for 1,000 KrisFlyer miles. You can only buy them in 1,000 miles increments, meaning some might go to waste.

Furthermore, if for some reason you need to cancel your booking, the miles you purchased are non-refundable whereas the miles you earned are refundable. We don’t like to throw money down the drain, and have needed to cancel award bookings on several occasions, so this makes us nervous.

The only time it might be worth it to purchase KrisFlyer miles is if you are minimally short of the miles you need and cannot wait to transfer points from any of your credit cards or other transfer partners, which can take days to weeks. We’ve seen award tickets disappear literally while we were on hold with a customer service agent, so if you see your dream award ticket available and have almost enough miles to purchase it, then we think its worth purchasing KrisFlyer miles to ensure that you get your award ticket before it’s gone.

Last words on how to earn Singapore KrisFlyer miles

As you can see there are many ways to earn KrisFlyer miles to fly Singapore Airlines on points, saving thousands of dollars. It’s one of the easiest airlines to travel hack and one of the world’s best airlines, which makes it a win win situation. Hopefully we’ve inspired you to travel hack on Singapore Airlines by showing you how easy it is to earn KrisFlyer Miles through credit cards, hotel stays, car rentals, flying them or their partner airlines, and even online shopping.