After years of flying ANA and booking award tickets (as hard as that's been), they've finally made it so insanely difficult that I'm calling it quits after I figure out how to use the 330K points I have in my account (if it even winds up being possible to use those damned points!). Many routes now have 1F1J, as previously noted, so if you want to fly to Japan with a spouse or friend, you're out of luck for booking -- by the time you manage to make a reservation for that one F or J flight, the other one will be gone (and you'd have to make two separate reservations). *Occasionally* 2F or 2J to show up, but there's no way to predict when this will happen that I've read about (after many hours of searching), so you just have to cross your fingers each day and subject yourself to a brutal and disheartening process around 9 AM JST over and over and over again. We've been trying for a couple weeks now (actually, a couple years -- we weren't able to make any awards reservation last year, though we tried) with no luck, and today, I decided to try to have a phoen rep do the booking, since phone reps (as often reported) can sometimes lock down flights a bit more quickly than one can do online. I somehow got through 10 minutes before 9 AM JST (after a ~35-min. wait), and as soon as I told the rep that I wanted to ask her a couple questions for the next 10 minutes and then to have her book for me, she said, "I'm sorry, you have to hang up and try calling back. Many customers are waiting in line, and we treat all of our customers equally." I asked why, as a customer, I couldn't ask other questions about my reservation, and rather than explaining, she told me again that I would have to hang up and call back. Of course, with long waits, no hope of getting anyone on the phone within ~7 minutes, and I think it's insane that this person *refused* to speak to continue speaking to me for just that short period of time.

Not sure all of that made sense, but the bottom line is this: relying on ANA to book F or J award flights only makes sense if 1) you're traveling alone and can book 355 days in advance, or 2) you're willing to try your chances again and again with waitlisted flights that will probably never clear. ANA will take your points, and unless you're traveling solo, you very likely won't be able to book an F or J flight given all of the ridiculous restrictions and hurdles they put in place, and you'll probably wind up losing your points altogether. When (if ever!) waitlisted flights clear, that only happens a couple weeks before departure, but reservations for the best hotels and restaurants are non-refundable (or refundable with other downsides) and have to be made sometimes 4+ months in advance, so I personally would never take a chance on a waitlisted flight.

It's insane to me that ANA treats travelers who've shoveled hundreds of thousands of points into their accounts with such contempt. By opening up only one J or F flight on most routes, they've made an already extremely painful process even more painful for traveling families. I can't wait to get rid of these points somehow and never to fly ANA again. (Did I mention that the J "The Room" seat is ROCK HARD -- apparently because otherwise there'd be insufficient differentiation between the F (nice, soft seat) and J classes?)