Thanks for the insight!

Super helpful - I suspected this would be a risk as I'm not experienced with JL to know if they pull holiday availability on award seats. When you mention the business class A/D seats being available, do you mean for cash fares? Or just award seats but from other US cities?

I mainly transferred to CX over BA due to CX's access at T+360 instead of BA's T+355. I was hoping the 5 day window would give me a slight advantage, as I've read that BA often does not have availability if CX books it all within the 5 day period.

However, your comment does seem to indicate that BA gets its own inventory for JL partner bookings (i.e. that isn't affected/shared with CX) - do you know if this is indeed the case? Would be a good learning point for next time.

I don't have concrete travel dates - was mainly looking to get the 360 calendar open booking as a means to ensure 2J availability, instead of some of the sporadic 1Js I've seen from other east coast cities. I'm not opposed to booking a refundable cash economy fare and then trying to book close-in at T-14 days for 2J if that generally has more success on CX for JL.