Originally Posted by
ukdoctor
Having booked several J fares from the UK for myself and parents, I've noticed a few changes.
Previously you could get saver fares even months in advance. Now the savers are released only a few weeks before the flights. ( depending on sales ).
In some cases the savers appeared 5 days before the flight. Its annoying as I like to book my tickets a few months in advance.
Maybe this varies with route/season and date of booking? My travel is exclusively Manchester-Japan MAN-DXB-TYO (usually HND if J, NRT if Y).
On this route there are usually no J saver tickets actually available over the Xmas period (even if they appear to be available on first check with the booking engine), but I did buy a J saver for mid-Jan departure a couple of weeks ago, and have just bought another for May departure. There seems to be very good availability for most dates except over the winter holidays and part of April.
The saver tickets on this routing are usually available for a long time ahead of departure date, but sometimes they are not offered at all. J saver sales periods seem to come and go - I've never worked out how it's decided. From a marketing point of view perhaps there does need to be an incentive to fly Emirates between Western Europe and Japan, as the flight times are very much longer than with European or Japanese carriers. Most of my Japanese friends prefer not to fly Emirates for this reason.