Originally Posted by
Debonaire
Yesterday I saw great J availability on the ORD-NRT route (seen on both QF and BA) - seats available on a good number of days in mid-May, and multiple seats for each day. Now they're all gone. I find it hard to believe that someone took all those seats in one day. Is JL known for removing award space like this? Or is there maybe some temporary hiding of award space for partners?
JL availability can be very fluid on the nearby months. BTW check if you are into the Golden Week(s) peak travel period.
When I checked for April departure from all gateways, I saw some dates at JFK and SFO were wide open (BA did not display how many seats just showed available). 2 days later these were all gone.
Then for a week or so there was hardly anything, all of a sudden I saw a few days out from ORD had as many as 6 J seats and 2F on one day and had J seats on other days though the dates did not work for us.
Eventually I took 2 J seats from JFK out of 4 on Apr 9. It showed 2 available for a few days then suddenly became 6 available. At ticketing I added NRT-ITM to the itinerary with the agent. eTicket came many hours later between 4 and 5am the next morning,
Therefore you just keep checking the gateways that are most convenient to you and you might be pleasantly surprised.
Personally I found JL near months releases are very decent - far far better than those at the opening of the booking window. There is no need, for now, to book a year out. Thank goodness, as our preferences always are the near months. In this case we did not even think about going to Japan until 8 or 9 days ago when we decided to book a 14 days TPAC cruise from Tokyo to Vancouver from last week of April, so we needed the flight to go over,