Originally Posted by vintagepilot

We appear to be on similar itineraries!

A lot of this depends on how flexible you are on dates and departure points. We booked the outbound to NRT, using the 241 voucher, albeit a couple of days earlier than originally planned, but the flights were available so we jumped in. Booking the return is usually more tetchy as you are probably now down to only a couple of feasible dates, but the watchword is to be flexible - so look at your preferred option, on the day you want, but be prepared to return from, say, Tokyo as well as Osaka, or even from somewhere outside Japan, or a day or two later.

We had already booked a flight from Tokyo to Hong Kong so our primary option was to return from Hong Kong - we were online at 0100 and managed to get the return booked, albeit for the full avios for 2 pax, and then called up later to have the voucher applied and half of the inbound avios refunded. The fall back, if there had been no HKG availability, was to return from Tokyo and cancel the local flight. Of course, you need to have enough avios to book the return at the full avios rate for two using this method. If you do it this way, they remain as separate bookings - which may have its advantages but also note that if want to cancel the whole thing it would be double the cancellation fees.

Online might be your best bet, if you can afford the initial avios outlay, as the seats appear at 1am UK time, which is 8pm in USA, which is when the office closes. You get put through to call centre elsewhere anyway, so you should be able to call just before 8pm and do deal a few minutes later - we did once manage to call the USA number from holiday in South Africa, at 1am UK time, to book a return from Vancouver - and it worked! If doing it online, do everything you can to speed up the booking process - make sure your companion is already 'in the system' and have your payment card saved - and have your CVV to hand. We have also gone through the whole online process as soon as seats appeared, only to see the transaction not go through at the last step - presumably the seats had either been bagged by a quicker clicker or, more likely, by an agent responding to a call.



We booked the TYO-HKG flight on JAL using avios which was pretty cheap and next to no taxes.