Originally Posted by
psoque
Hi. I recently redeemed BA Avios to secure two JAL business class ORD-HND round trip for April 2023. I thought I started looking as soon as these awards were released, but I noticed that there weren’t much First class awards available on BA or point.me websites. I also checked ANA award space and found similar results, and actually had even less business class availability there.
Is there a good reason both JAL and ANA are not releasing as many first class (and both first class and business class for ANA) for 2023? I heard form someone who travels in premium class a lot that both first and business class seats are fairly full on man of the flights he has taken recently. Is this because of greater demand/still diminished supply?
I've noticed that if you go through a dummy booking via the JAL website and see that only 1A/K are blocked/taken on the F seatmap and every other seat is available, one F award seat will eventually open up. The downside is that there's no set time on when it'll open up for booking. It could happen at 7am or it could happen at 10pm. As to why they release so little at a time, I'd say it's because of the pandemic and how airlines (even more so with foreign airlines) have lost tons of traffic. Availability could go up once travel returns to normal or it could stay limited.