Originally Posted by TravelLawyer

Exception is if AA mis-caters and is short a meal. Then they give you an econ meal - and that meal is much worse than a JAL econ meal. (Or at least they did with me when flying AA LAX-HKG.) And on the same flight, AA did an op-up for a mom with a lap child from Y to PE next to me (otherwise would have been empty - hence the miscatered # of meals), so I actually had much less private space as the lap child was likely days shy of being 2 and was constantly spilling over to my seat. For $600 savings difference, I would fly JAL Y.