All airlines around the world, not just ANA and JAL, went through a very difficult time financially past few years due to the pandemic. It will be nothing surprising to see airlines want to see their seats occupied by paid revenue tickets, rather than seats occupied by award miles. Airlines are eager to get as much cash flow as possible as we come out of the pandemic and travel demand starting to return. The general conses is that ANA and JAL are the airlines that can attract cash paying passengers in their premium cabin. Where U.S. airlines pretty much gave up on international first class on many routes, ANA and JAL say Tokyo - New York City and Tokyo - Los Angeles are routes where there is still demand for first class and they can sell first class seats and first class being financially profitable.

Also today most airlines use revenue management software for their ticket sales, including award seats. The revenue management software uses past ticket sales data to predict how to set the availability of different fares, including the availability of award seats. But past few years during the pandemic faced a situation that never happened in international air travel. Under such a situation, the revenue management software fails to predict the proper ticket availability for the flights. American Airlines revenue management said on MSNBC business TV program that pre-pandemic close to 90% plus of their seats and fares were controlled by the revenue management software, and less than 10% of the situation required human intervention to adjust fares and seat availabilities. Where human intervention is required when the revenue management software is not predicting the ticket sales trend of the specific flight favorably to the airline.

In the current situation of international air travel coming out of this world wide pandemic which we have never experienced before, it is highly likely airlines are requiring far greater cases of human intervention on flight reservations because the revenue management software is not predicting ticket sales accurately. But most likely airlines do not have enough manpower (employees) in the revenue management department, because airlines never needed that many people in their revenue management department to do more manual work in their reservation system.

In general Japanese companies tend to be more conservative in their business approach than compared with their U.S. companies, it is a cultural thing. Because of all the above situations, I am not surprised to see that at this moment ANA and JAL are setting award seat availability on the conservative side.

As a reference, I am an American Airlines AAdvantage member so I am looking at international award availability for the second half of this year. Last year during the pandemic I easily found an international business class award for 60,000 miles each way. But now same international award miles are 300,000 miles each way when I looked up for a trip this autumn, five times more miles. It looks like it is not just ANA and JAL which is being stringent on award seats.