Is Pelago Worth It? 10 Things to Know About Singapore Airlines' Activities App: Getting US$16 Off, What You Really Save and the Catches

Pelago is a platform for booking the fun parts of a trip: attraction tickets, day tours, theme parks, rail passes, airport transfers, eSIMs, lounges and so on. The company behind it is Encounters Pte. Ltd., registered in Singapore, and Singapore Airlines' 2025/26 financial statements list it as 100% owned. Singapore Airlines came up with the idea in 2019, launched it properly in Singapore in 2021 and took it across Asia-Pacific and Europe in 2022 and 2023; the app only arrived in December 2024.

It holds a Singapore travel agent licence (TA03351), but it doesn't run any activities itself. Its terms spell out that you're booking with the local activity operator, and Pelago is the middleman that sells the tickets, takes your money and handles support. So if something goes wrong, it mostly comes down to the operator's rules and the cancellation policy on the product page. And because you're buying standalone tickets rather than joining a package tour, your protection mainly comes from that cancellation policy, Pelago's terms and your credit card's chargeback process.

Pelago says it covers 2,000-plus destinations and more than 200,000 activities, and its App Store listing says 150-plus countries. It started in Singapore, spread across Asia-Pacific and only added Europe later; the app's languages tell you who its customers are: English, Korean, Japanese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai and Simplified Chinese. Singapore, Japan, Korea, Thailand and Bali, all Hong Kong favourites, are its home turf.

Pelago doesn't sell flights. If you're flying Singapore Airlines or Scoot, enter your flight booking reference at checkout to claim a separate passenger discount; that counts as a promotion too, though, so it won't stack with the referral code.

Tap our invite link and you land on Pelago's referral page; create a new account right there with KrisFlyer, Google, Facebook or email. The moment you're signed up, Pelago gives you a US$8 referral code that works twice. The terms say you have to tap the referral link and register on that page, so there's no code to type in; open an account directly in the app or on the website and you won't get the referral code at all.

Next, log in to the Pelago app with the same account. The referral code only works in the app, each booking must be at least S$75 or the equivalent (about HK$459), and the code expires 90 days after it's issued; just pick it at checkout. It can't be combined with any other promotion or promo code, and some products are on Pelago's exclusions list. The invite link locks in the code's currency and amount, so even if you browse in Hong Kong dollars, it takes off US$8 every time.

Full disclosure: the invite link uses our own referral code, RF4A3KM9. Once your first booking is completed, Pelago sends us a promo code too; your discount doesn't shrink, and you don't pay a cent more.

The referral code is a fixed amount, not a percentage, so the closer your booking is to S$75, the more it's worth. At early November 2026 exchange rates, US$8 is about S$10.25 or HK$63: that's 13.7% off a S$75 booking, 10.2% off S$100, 5.1% off S$200 and only 3.4% off S$300.

Say a couple is off to Singapore: one week they book S$80 of attraction tickets, and the next a S$80 river cruise with dinner. Each booking gets US$8 off, so S$160 drops to about S$139.50, saving them roughly HK$126. Put the code on a single S$600 family theme-park booking instead and you only get to use it once, for less than 2% off. The sweet spot is splitting it across two mid-priced activities you were going to book anyway.

Every new account also gets Pelago's own new-user promo code: 10% off, capped at S$10, valid for 90 days and only on your first booking. Tick the box to receive marketing when you sign up and you get one more: 10% off, capped at S$5, valid for 180 days, usable once.

The catch is one promotion per booking. The invite page says the referral code takes US$8 off each of your first two app bookings, and US$8 (about S$10.25) is no less than the new-user code's S$10 maximum, so just put the referral code on your first two eligible bookings. That leaves the new-user code unused on your first booking, but the S$5 marketing code is still yours for a later one.

Sign up with or link your KrisFlyer account and Pelago activity bookings earn 3 KrisFlyer miles per S$1. Miles are worked out on what you actually pay after discounts, and they're taken back if you cancel; Pelago says they land within 7 days after your activity, while Singapore Airlines says it can take up to 15 working days. Since September 2025 you also get 1 Elite mile per S$1, which counts towards your KrisFlyer membership tier.

KrisFlyer is Singapore Airlines' frequent flyer programme and free to join, but it's a completely separate thing from Cathay's Asia Miles, and the two don't talk to each other. A S$150 day tour paid in full earns 450 miles, or about 420 after the US$8 off. Pelago also lets you pay with miles at 100 miles to S$1, so about 1 Singapore cent a mile, but the whole booking has to go on miles, with a 1,000-mile minimum; redeeming them for flights usually gets you a lot more. If you only collect Asia Miles, treat these as a bonus and don't book anything just for the miles.

You can see prices in Hong Kong dollars or 19 other currencies, and the price shown already includes Pelago's price, fees and taxes, with no extra booking fee. You can pay with Visa, Mastercard, American Express or UnionPay, plus Apple Pay in Safari and Google Pay; there's no PayPal, and Alipay and WeChat Pay have been paused since July 2026.

Pelago bookings are processed in Singapore, and its own help centre warns that cards issued outside Singapore may be charged an overseas transaction fee. Some Hong Kong credit cards charge that whenever the merchant is overseas, even if you pay in Hong Kong dollars, so check your card's fee table before you pay. After you book, Pelago holds the amount on your card until the booking is confirmed: plenty of activities confirm instantly, and ones that need manual confirmation usually take 24 to 72 hours; once it's confirmed, PDF e-tickets arrive by email and WhatsApp.

Every product page shows one of three policies: free cancellation, free cancellation up to a set number of hours or days before the activity (local time), or no cancellation. Cancel after the deadline or don't turn up and you get nothing back, full stop. Rescheduling is only a request, not something you can just do: you have to ask at least 3 days before the activity, and the operator can still say no.

If the operator cancels, Pelago refunds the full amount to the payment method you used. Its help centre gives several versions of how long card refunds take, anywhere from within 10 working days to 30 working days, before your bank's own processing, and the terms don't commit to a date. The referral terms don't say whether a used referral code comes back if a booking is cancelled either, so spend both discounts on activities you're sure you'll do.

Support starts with an AI assistant that runs 24 hours a day. Live chat with a real person is only for KrisFlyer elite members and customers with an activity today or coming up soon; everyone else opens a case, which Pelago aims to answer within two working days. There's no phone line, and the email address is [email protected]. Neither the app nor the website has Traditional Chinese, so if you'd rather not read English, Simplified Chinese is your only other option.

As of 4 November 2026, the app has just 7 ratings on the Hong Kong App Store, averaging 3.7, which doesn't tell you much; the Singapore App Store has it at 4.4 (318 ratings), and Google Play Hong Kong shows 4.2 (571 ratings, over 100,000 downloads). The fans mostly say it's easy to book, earns miles and gets you discounts when you fly Singapore Airlines. The complaints keep coming back to support stuck behind the AI, refunds dragging on for months after a failed booking or an operator cancellation, missing miles, operators not showing up or not passing on a cancellation, product pages that weren't clear about peak days or when tickets expire, and failed payments that looked like they'd been charged twice.

Signing up takes a few minutes, and the invite page gives you four ways in: KrisFlyer, Google, Facebook, or email plus a one-time code. It's one account per person; if Pelago thinks you've opened a fake or duplicate account, it can hold back your codes or even suspend the account. The app is on iPhone and Android, and the referral code has to be used in the app.

To delete your account, you ask the virtual assistant in the app; Pelago says it takes 3 to 5 days, and any bookings and unused promo codes in the account go with it, so use or cancel them first. Some of your data may be kept where the law requires it.

Good fit: Hong Kong residents off to Singapore or another Asian city in the next three months, with two paid activities of roughly S$75 to S$150 already in mind, who don't mind booking in an English or Simplified Chinese app. KrisFlyer members and frequent Singapore Airlines flyers get the most out of it.

Skip it if you only want one ticket under S$75, your plans aren't fixed and you'd rather not book activities you can't cancel, you need phone or Traditional Chinese support, or your card charges a fee on overseas merchants.