Cathay and Singapore Airlines both publish what it costs to change or cancel an award ticket, on pages you can read before you book. Cathay quotes one figure for every award it sells. Singapore Airlines quotes a grid, and your place on it was fixed at booking by the award type you bought.
Cathay: one price whatever you booked
Cathay’s fees do not vary by cabin or route.
- Changing the date online costs USD 50 or 7,500 Asia Miles, per flight ticket, per passenger.
- Cancelling costs USD 120 or 17,000 Asia Miles. Cathay’s wording is that “a completely unused ticket can be cancelled for a service fee”. The miles go back to your membership account, and airport taxes and fuel surcharges are refunded to the card that paid them.
- Any other channel adds a booking and ticketing service fee of USD 40 or 6,000 Asia Miles, per booking, per occurrence, if the change does not go through online self-service.
Awards that cannot be changed online
For these the USD 40 is unavoidable. Online date changes cover standard awards on Cathay Pacific flights, “except for flight itineraries involving more than two stopovers, open-jaw tickets, mixed-carrier awards, upgrade awards or companion awards, which must be rebooked via other channels”.
A two-city open-jaw built on miles is the booking most likely to need moving, and it cannot be moved from a browser. It costs USD 90 to change rather than USD 50.
Some conditions block a change whatever you pay: the operating airline cannot change, the origin and destination airports must stay the same, and the new date must fall inside the ticket’s validity period.
Singapore Airlines: the fee depends on the award type
KrisFlyer has no single figure. It depends on the award type you chose at booking: Saver, Advantage or Access. From Singapore Airlines’ service fee schedule:
| Redemption ticket change | Saver | Advantage | Access |
|---|---|---|---|
| Change of date on Singapore Airlines | USD 25 | USD 0 | USD 0 |
| Change of route, cabin, award type or add a stopover | USD 25 | USD 25 | USD 25 |
| Change of date, route, flight or carrier on partner airlines | USD 50 | Not applicable | Not applicable |
| Redeposit of miles | USD 75 | USD 50 | USD 50 |
Moving the date of an Advantage or Access award on Singapore Airlines is free. It is the only place in either airline’s schedule where a change costs nothing.
Getting your miles back from a Saver award costs USD 75, half as much again as the other two. Saver is the award most people book because it was cheapest in miles.
Doing any of this through a Singapore Airlines office or the reservations hotline adds USD 25 or 2,500 KrisFlyer miles. The charge is waived for PPS Club members and supplementary cardholders, and for anything that cannot be done online.
The no-show fee
Cathay’s pages do not mention a no-show charge on award tickets. Singapore Airlines publishes one, and it is larger than either change fee.
Miss the flight without cancelling and the fee is USD 100 in Economy, USD 200 in Premium Economy and USD 300 in Business or First. It does not replace the redeposit fee. Singapore Airlines says it “applies in addition to any other applicable fees” and gives a worked example: fail to show for an Economy Saver award, then ask for a refund, and you pay USD 100 plus USD 75, “a total of: USD 100 + USD 75 = USD 175”.
The cheapest move with an award you will not use is to cancel it. On a Saver award in Business, not cancelling turns a USD 75 fee into USD 375.
The ticket must be completely unused
Both airlines tie the refund to this condition. Cathay refunds miles on “a completely unused ticket”. Singapore Airlines says the redeposit fee applies where “award and redemption tickets must be completely unused”, and the miles and the ticket must both still be valid when you redeposit.
If you fly the outbound and drop the return, neither programme takes the ticket back for miles. Singapore Airlines also restricts what a part-used ticket can become: “no change of route, cabin class or award type is allowed for partially-used tickets issued on Singapore Airlines”, and on partner airlines, no changes at all.
Deadlines
Cathay sets two different ones. A change must be requested before the original departure date. A cancellation must happen before the ticket expiry date, and Cathay notes that flight awards are usually valid for one year from the date of issue. The two dates are often months apart, and the later one governs getting miles back.
Singapore Airlines does not publish a comparable pair on its fee page. Its condition is that the miles and the ticket are both valid when you redeposit.
What the pages leave out
- Cathay says taxes and fuel surcharges go back to the original card. Singapore Airlines’ schedule does not address taxes on a redeposited award.
- Singapore Airlines warns that “where multiple changes and services are used online or offline, fees applicable are cumulative”. It works no example beyond the no-show one, and nothing on the page adds the lines up for you. A route change plus an offline partner-airline booking is three separate lines of the table.
- Cathay states its fees alongside the rules that trigger them, so the USD 40 offline charge is easy to find. Singapore Airlines puts its conditions in footnotes under the table, so a Saver traveller reading only their own column sees USD 75 and misses the USD 100 no-show fee one table lower.
Both schedules were read on 12 September 2026.