ANZ Travel Signature

The ANZ Travel Visa Signature card.
Perks include
Complimentary Airport Limo Transfer - Spend $1500 in a calender month and call ANZ customer service to redeem. They will verify the spending and email you a voucher which you can then fill in and then fax/email to the company. Spending 3000 in a month will not get you a second voucher

Priority Pass Lounge Access
2 free visits a year. A guest will not be able to use the complimentary free visit. Free visits only applicable to card holder.

SATS lounge voucher
2 vouchers sent in the welcome package. Only the cardholder is allowed to use it. Additional visits can be obtained by spending $1500 in a calendar month(amount used to redeem airport transfer cannot be used again for SATS vouchers).

Complimentary Travel insurance when you use the card to buy air tickets for yourself or someone else.

Miles Calculation

S$1 local spending = 1.4 miles
S$1 foreign spending in Australia and New Zealand, flight bookings and selected partners = 2.8 miles

Annual fees: $200 (waived for the 1st year). Payment of annual fee rewards you with 20000 miles

Miles Conversion: Miles in your ANZ account last for 5 years. The amount can only be checked with the statement comes or you can call in to ANZ to check(takes ages to get to a CSO to attend to you).
Conversion fees are 25 dollars. Min amount to convert is 500 miles, additional miles in blocks of 500 miles.

Word of caution. Spend within your means. Do not accumulate your bills. Settle your outstanding balance in full and promptly to avoid any hefty interest charges.

Long Weekend to Bangkok!

Aug 8 to Aug 11th is a super long weekend thanks to Hari Raya and National Day..
Decided on this trip rather late in June. By then, all the budget tickets are non-so in my budget anymore.
Luckily, I have my stash of miles in my KF to turn to.
Not surprising.. Outgoing flights from Sin to BKK are all fully redeemed across all levels of redemption on Aug 8th.

The left most column is saver award redemption, followed by standard award in the middle and full award redemption on the right. All 3 awards are on waiting list which means you need someone to cancel their trip before the airline start even looking at their waiting list.

The same situation is seen on Sunday Aug 12th, when everyone starts coming back from Bangkok into Singapore. To avoid the hot dates, we decided to book SIN-BKK economy standard tickets on Aug 7th and BKK-SIN Business saver on Aug 11th. Both awards are available for booking for a total of 38500 miles and ~200 sgd in taxes per person. With that, the tickets were settled and let the hotel selection begin!

A Brief Introduction to Frequent Flyer Programs Part II

After accumulation of miles via travelling or by credit card usage, you should have signed up for a krisflyer account by now. Transfer the miles from your credit card account to your KF account.

To redeem a flight, log in to Krisflyer and key in your destination.
A round trip saver economy ticket from Singapore to Hong Kong costs 25000 miles and a tax/fuel charges of $170.40. Online booking gets you a further 15% discount on the miles needed and the miles deducted is then reduced to 21250 miles. For Holidays, availability is lower as airlines are able to sell more regular tickets and FFP members tend to travel more on these dates as well. Hence, plan your trips well in advance!
SQ bookings are open 363 days in advance.

It is generally more worthwhile to book further destinations. For example, a round trip economy saver from singapore to milan costs 59500 miles(with discount) and 543 dollars in taxes. That's a pretty good deal as a regular ticket costs ~$1600.
A lot of planning is needed to plan for your dream trip. So always plan ahead!

Priority Pass

Ah the Priority Pass. My first lounge visit was using the PP to enter the Skyview lounge in Changi Airport Terminal 1. Please take note that you can use the card to enter any PP lounge as long you are departing on a outbound flight from Changi. Budget airline? No problem, I used the PP when i was going to HK on a Jetstar flight. Ate my fill before departing so that I do not get hungry and buy expensive food on the flight!

The airport lounges at Changi that a PP card can get you in are:

Terminal 1:
Skyview Lounge(review)
Rainforest by SATS

Terminal 2:
The Green Market
Ambassador Transit Lounge(review)

Terminal 3:
Ambassador Transit Lounge

there are over 600 lounges in airports worldwide. The list can be found at here. If you are using the complimentary PP card as I talked about, you get 2 free visits per PP card. Yes, different credit cards each give you a different PP card. If you have the citi PM card and the DBS Altitude card, you get 2 PP cards that allows you 4 free lounge visits a year.However, only the Citi PM card allows you to bring a guest along to count as an additional visit. The DBS altitude PP card only allows the card holder to enter the lounge, guests are charged 25 usd per visit. Likewise for the ANZ travel card.

Citibank Premiermiles

As mentioned in my first post, the Citibank Premiermiles card comes with a complimentary Priority Pass.
This is a complimentary pass that gives the holder 2 free lounge visits per calendar year. The holder is allowed to invite another guest with him, with the guest counting as another visit as well. You need to bring along the PP card together with you when using the lounge.

Miles calculation
The spending perks of the PM card is as follows:

S$1 local spending = 1.2 miles
S$1 foreign spending = 2 miles


Annual fees: Citibank annual fee is quite easily waived. However, if you choose to pay the annual fee of 192.60, you will get 10000 miles credited to your PM account which is quite worthwhile.

Miles Conversion: Miles in your premiermiles account do not expire and can be transferred to the major airlines FFP for a transfer fee of 25 dollars.(details). A minimum of 2000 miles have to be transferred each time, in multiples of 1000. Ratio of miles transfer differ with each FFP. For Krisflyer(KF), the exchange rate is 1 PM miles to 1KF miles. It makes sense to wait til you have tons of miles or when you are ready to make a redemption before transferring, as once transferred to the KF account, the miles would expire in 3 years.

Note that some merchants offer discount or Citi rebates when you choose to use to pay by Citibank cards. Use of the PM card earn you miles and Citi rebates at the same time. Do not confuse the two.

Word of caution. Spend within your means. Do not accumulate your bills. Settle your outstanding balance in full and promptly to avoid any hefty interest charges.

Airport Lounges

Airport lounges, as the name implies, are areas in airports where outbound travellers have a place to rest,eat for free, drink(alcohol only in some lounges). Most lounges provide free wifi, computer terminals. Some even have showers that you can freshen up in between transit flights.

The lounges available depends on the airport itself and the status of the travellers themselves. Once again, frequent flyers have status that allow them entry into specific lounges. Krisflyer PPS members for example,  are able to enter SilverKris lounges worldwide.

SIA First Class passengers will be able to use Silverkris lounges and the private room,which is a restaurant within the lounge, exclusively for first class passengers only.

For those who do not have such lofty statuses, fret not. Singapore have a few credit card programs that comes with a complimentary priority pass for lounges that allows for free lounge visits twice a year.
They are the Citibank PM, DBS Altitude Visa, ANZ Travel Visa and Diners Club.

Read on the reviews of the various card
Citi PM

A Brief Introduction to Frequent Flyer Programs

Frequent Flyer Programs or FFP are customer loyalty programs setup by each individual airlines to encourage travellers to fly more frequently through them.  For Singapore Airlines, their FFP is called Krisflyer.

The most basic away to earn miles on FFPs is by actually flying the airlines, actual butt in seat. A  full-fare SIA return economy class ticket from Singapore to Hong Kong will earn 3188 miles. Some discounted/on-sale tickets do not earn miles, so take note of that. This method of earning miles benefits mainly business travellers, where their company pays for the ticket but the person travelling earns the miles. Common folk, like myself do not benefit from this method of earning miles, as SIA and other non-budget airlines tickets are usually more expensive and their on-sale fares usually do not earn the traveller any miles.

The second method is to earn miles via credit card reward programs offered by various Banks. I got my first credit card, Citibank Premiermiles(PM) card 4 years back. Back then, being a Citibank customer, I signed up by a phone call and the card came with an application to Priority Pass to airport lounge.(More on the PP later). Any spending on the card would be converted to miles which is be stored in your premiermiles card account and updated in your monthly statement. The exchange rate is:

S$1 local spending = 1.2 miles
S$1 foreign spending = 2 miles

Miles in your premiermiles do not expire and can be transferred to the major airlines FFP for a transfer fee of 25 dollars.(details). A minimum of 2000 miles have to be transferred each time, in multiples of 1000. Ratio of miles transfer differ with each FFP. For Krisflyer(KF), the exchange rate is 1 PM miles to 1KF miles. It makes sense to wait til you have tons of miles or when you are ready to make a redemption before transferring, as once transferred to the KF account, the miles would expire in 3 years.

The second method is the bulk of which my miles come from, as I almost use credit card exclusively to maximise the number of miles I can earn. Different cards have different perks when you use them in different ways. I shall talk about them in more detail in my later posts.