I just booked a round trip award ticket on ANA. I just wanted to share how I did it and why. Any suggestions for improvement next time would be appreciated. We have been visiting Japan every year for about 8 years, usually around Thanksgiving.
We live in Indianapolis, and the closest airport served by ANA/JAL is Chicago ORD. If we want to fly out of IND and take ANA/JAL transpacific flight, we have to take either United or American flights one of the airports served by ANA/JAL.
Our preference is to take either ANA or JAL on the trans-pacific portion. We were also willing to try Air Canada via Toronto if we could find business/first awards, since it has a very nice itinerary from IND.
I had enough AMEX MR or Chase UR to do this, but I realized that:
1. ANA releases awards much sooner for those planning to use ANA Mileage Club Points.
2. It takes much fewer ANA Mileage Club Points v. United MileagePlus points to fly on ANA.
3. But ANA charges (fuel?) surcharges that is much higher than United.
4. It takes even fewer Virgin Atlantic Flying Club points to fly on ANA, but ANA awards are released to Virgin Atlantic later (possibly even later than that to United). And the "savings" by using the Virgin Atlantic route vs. ANA is not as drastic as ANA vs. United.
5. We also could have tried Air Canada (IND-,YYZ-HND and then the reverse), but none of their business/first awards were available at that time. Just the economy seats were listed on both ANA and United websites. I did not check the Air Canada website (maybe I should have?).
We had about 240,000 MR and about 218,000 UR when we started thinking about this.
So, ideally, I could have waited until next month to get the tickets through Virgin Atlantic (who actually holds award seats while transferring points, in contrast to ANA or United??), but I was seeing that award seats at this popular time for travel was booking fast, so I pulled the trigger early by transferring my MR to ANA.
Since it was still less than 330 days before the date of return travel, ANA did not list the United IND-ORD flights in the award search, so we decided to drive to ORD to catch the flights. We were flexible enough, especially on the return to ORD, in terms of which airport in Japan to start our return journey.
Transfer of MR to ANA took about 36 hours. When we -re-checked the ANA website, the desired ORD-HND flight was still available in Business. The return ITM-NRT-ORD flight in the afternoon was all gone in both business and first, so we settled with NRT-ORD in first class. This will take an extra train trip from Kyoto to Narita, but since the flight leaves around 5 PM, we can manage that approx. 4 hour trip to get to Narita either that day or the day before.
So we spent 235,000 ANA points plus approx $700 for two passengers, ORD-HND on ANA business and NRT-ORD on ANA first. If we waited and went the Virgin Atlantic route, we could have saved about 20,000 UR points, but we wanted to secure these seats before they disappeared. The major downside of this itinerary is that we are flying out of ORD. We could purchase a separate round trip ticket IND-ORD/MDW to avoid the driving, though.
We have always been arriving in Japan at Narita, but we are looking forward to flying into Haneda this time.