Well, so much for flying home on Korean Air after I failed to clear a single flight off the waitlist using my SkyPass points with its “Standby Award Booking” tool.
Korean Air SkyPass Waitlist For Award Flights: I Went 0/15 On This Trip Using Standby Award Booking…
Korean Air SkyPass may have delayed a devaluation to its award charts, but it also stopped releasing first class award space altogether…not a single flight on a single date has first class award availability and it has been that way for months…
But Korean Air also has an award waitlist feature, allowing you to waitlist for the cabin of service you wish to fly and then wait (hope, pray…) that your seat will clear. It costs nothing to waitlist and your miles are not deducted immediately, allowing you to waitlist for multiple flights at once even with insufficient miles (you just need enough miles for the specific flight(s) you are waitlisting on).
When searching for award space, you can click on the light blue “Go To Standby Award Booking” button on the bottom right corner of the screen.
Then check off the box(es) of the flight(s) you want standby on and click next.
Fill out the required info and then click on “Request for Award Standby Booking” and a booking confirmation is generated. It just takes a few seconds.
In my case, I have 80K SkyPass miles left (the cost of a one-way first class award between North America and South Korea) and waitlisted for five flights a day for three days in a row:
- Atlanta (daily flight) – 747-8
- Los Angeles (two daily flights) – A380
- New York (two daily flights) – 747-8
If the standby clears, you are supposed to receive a mobile message and/or email.
If the standby does not clear within 24 hours of departure, it is automatically dropped off.
Nothing cleared on the first day.
Nothing cleared on the second day.
By the third day (nothing cleared again), I gave up and flew home on a walk-up United ticket ($1238 one-way premium economy, upgraded to Polaris Business class).
I could have flown in business class on the A380 to LAX, but I’m still holding out hope for first class…maybe foolishly.
The sad thing? All of the flights above went out with open first class seats…including EIGHT to Los Angeles.
CONCLUSION
Korean Air may not have devalued its award chart, but it is not releasing first class award space at this time. If my experience is any indicator, the waitlist/standby function is theoretical too…of the 15 flights I waitlisted to travel from Seoul to the USA, none of them cleared despite many open seats.
Has anyone had success recently clearing the Korean Air waitlist?
image: Korean Air