Originally Posted by
Travailen
I dunno, the N'Ex is pretty effortless. My hotel is in Shinjuku. I get there in roughly an hour, hour 15 minutes. And, I can do that with a $7,000 'I' class fare, upgraded to First Class with an EVIP (versus the $12K for a fully flexible J seat.)
I dunno...the chopper ride isn't worth $5K to me. That is one expensive helicopter ride.
You save about 30 minutes, still have to take surface transport to/from Akasaka (a limo, granted) -- and with the typically gusty winds near NRT -- it has got to be one heckuva ride!!!
Plus, one has to factor in how frequent and how many helicopters they have. On a busy US-NRT route, there could be dozens of J or F flyers on AA, and I don't think Mori City Air has that many helicopters that could be used at any given time.
And looking at the time schedule and the restrictive time slots at NRT which arrive 15:00-17:00, probably not a lot of AA fliers can make the final helicopter ride into Tokyo either:
http://www.mcas.co.jp/en/flight/schedule/
LAX-NRT arrives 16:40 (without any delays), considering time to deplane, get thru immigration and customs, collect bags....I don't think anyone would make the final 17:15 flight to Akasaka heliport
Interestingly, the price of the service that MCAS is JPY 38,000 oneway, JPY 70,000 roundtrip
http://www.mcas.co.jp/en/flight/faretable/
OTOH, the New Skyliner scheduled to open this year which gets to Tokyo 6 minutes later cost only JPY 2400, it's probably much more frequent, and no worries about reserving a seat in advance because they'll have plenty of seats available, and no worries about catching the last one out
