Asia - CO, DL, or NW to Narita?

Topic sums it up, just wondering from experience which of these carriers would be the best ride to Tokyo?

Thanks.

Given CO's and especially DL's limited number of routes into NRT, probably NW. This really boils down to your location, FFP preferences, and prices. The products are roughly equivalent IMO.

Posters on the DL forum regularly report about DL's ATL-NRT MD-11 being forced to make an unscheduled refueling stop on the way, resulting in a few hours delay.

What is your originating city and which class are you flying?

In general, I'd recommend CO or DL over NW. I've had nothing but bad experiences, in almost every respect, with NW. All other things being equal, go for CO (at least in business class).

I had a particularly good experience with NW service to Narita. This was a few years back but I was impressed.

We were scheduled to fly business class from Detroit to Narita and connect there to Singapore. About a half hour before I leave the house (on a Sunday morning) the phone rings. It's NW - the DRW-NRT flight is cancelled. By the time they called they had already re-booked us in First for ORD-NRT, but to get us to ORD in time we need to get a UA flight to ORD that leaves about a half hour before the original flight to DTW.

When we got to ORD there was a NW agent at the UA gate to lead us through the airport, showing us the gate for NRT and dropping us off at the arrivals lounge.

To top it off, NW credited us (unsolicited) with something like 10K or 20K miles for our 'inconvenience'.

On the other hand, I don't have any experience with CO or DL across the Pacific. At that time UA was a reasonable alternative to SIN from the eastern US.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by jtrader:
What is your originating city and which class are you flying?</font>

I'm flying out of YYZ. AC offers direct flights from here, but is always a few hundred dollars more than US based carriers (Economy).

What about NH, JL, or UA?

DL used to fly out of PDX to NRT (no more, unfortunately), and while I'm not up on my aircraft makes and models, the configuration was 2-5-2. I was content with the aisle seats on the sides, which somehow seemed much more comfortable than aisle seats in a 3-3 configuration. The food was okay economy class fare, and they brought around ice cream just at the point where you were beginning to think that a snack might be nice.

I haven't flown Northwest across the Pacific since 1990, so I won't comment on that, and I've never taken Continental overseas.

I liked NH (ANA) though, for their leg room in coach (34" seat pitch for everyone!) and their wonderfully gracious and professional flight attendants.