I am doing research for trying to book my first J trip on ANA using aeroplan points to Japan from Toronto. While looking around I stumbled upon the ANA International Award Calendar which shows availability with four different indicators: Wide open, Open, Tight Waitlisted, and Unavailable. Looking through this chart, everything North America to Tokyo is either Tight Waitlisted or Unavailable until November, which is where the chart ends.
Does that mean that all ANA award space is booked up until November? The chart is showing the same thing for Economy and Premium Economy as well, which would explain why I can't find award space on those as well.
I started manually monitoring flights a few months ago and always noticed a lot of availability for t-21, but that has completely dried up around the end of April and I don't even see economy ANA flights available through Aeroplan's portal. My research led to two possibilities for the shortage of ANA flights; Golden Week and a price error in April. Golden week is long gone and availability hasn't come back, and the price error was all supposedly cancelled.
My flight is suppose to be mid October, so I think I will keep monitoring for another month, and if nothing I'll just book economy with Air Canada for 44k points before that disappears also.
I am looking for the same as well, and not seeing a single peep of availability. Funny enough I'm also waiting for a bit before going through AC with points... ANA service is so much better than AC..