JL website is going to show availability for those using JL miles, not AS miles. are you seeing the same on BA website or QF?

From what I've seen, seats available on JL website are also available for redemption from partners. It's the case for F anyway. When I was monitoring award space, everyday when JL would release their seats, they would show up on BA immediately. To the second.

Yes, BA's website shows 4 seats available in economy, 2 in premium economy and 2 in Business for 6/9/18

AS website is showing nothing for that date in any class.

JL's website shows plenty too.

Seems like JL is not releasing award seats to AS for whatever reason when they have plenty.

This is an AS issue. AS blocks awards on the website for 5 more days than other partners. Now, 7/18 at 10pm PDT, AS website is showing JL availability up through 6/8 which is 325 days out. At midnight PDT tonight (in a couple of hours) the AS website will show JL availability for 6/9. I do not know if this is limited to the website. Did you try calling it in?

I don't think that is the issue, because on Friday 7/7/17, I was able to book 4 seats in economy for 6/10/18 (even though 6/9/18 was not available) . and you can also see that 6/11-6/14 are all available.

only 6/9 is not available. AS had no good explanation other than that JL just gives them whatever they have with no rhyme or reason.

I see what you mean about the 6/11, 6/12, etc. That is new to me. Have you tried calling in for the 6/9 dates? Maybe it is just a website glitch?

Even so, based on my previous experience I would expect if availability shows up on BA's site for 6/9 after midnight tonight it should show on AS. I could be wrong but that is the pattern I have seen in the past.

Keep in mind that BA will only show a max of 4 seats for JL even if there are more available. Using my Jedi powers I see 5 economy seats available on 6/9 SFO-HND and I fully expect those to show after midnight tonight. I would try for them then.

Yeah, AS partner award booking desk wasn't much help. they said they only see what we see and nothing more. They had no good explanation. AS' website is really glitchy. If you search by month calendar vs. week calendar you get diff't results.

And often those results are incorrect. if you search the calendar view, it shows 6/9 available for 35k, but when you click on it, nothing is available. and on the week view it often shows higher award tickets, but then if you go back to calendar view and then click on the date you want, a lower mileage seat may be available.

Regarding the BA website, they show seats on JL through 6/14/18, so the same as AS.

Is there any way to fly to Japan from the USA and then route back to Hawaii on JAL on a single tawaed ticket? I'm guessing no... But figured I'd check!

I actually was waiting for some inventory 6/8 that was not available until today which aligned with the pattern I had been following and based on that pattern I expect 6/9 to be available on AS after midnight tonight. I am curious about this 6/9 so we'll see what happens after midnight tonight.

Unlikely, unless there's a glitch. Alaska only has AS, VX, & AA as options for a single USA-Hawaii award. Any other routings would be two or more awards.

AS is full of it. This is an AS IT issue.

I checked and did not see 6/9 space open at midnight :(

Maybe it will open later this morning? If it does not here is a workaround you can use if you have enough miles for an extra set of economy round trips:

You can get AS website to show you 6/9 availability if it is part of a return of a round trip. You are looking for 4 economy seats 6/9 SFO-HND, right? If you search for a round-trip (where you know there is space available) you can get the 6/9 space to show.

I searched for a round-trip:
5/30 HND-SFO
6/9 SFO-HND

and the space shows up for the 6/9 return. You can book this as a round-trip and once it tickets you can cancel the outbound leaving only the return. This is what I had to do. If the AS site has a glitch when booking the round-trip you will get a message saying it is on hold and you need to call for manual assistance. When you call they can get it ticketed but it may take waiting for JL to confirm the space (which they will do if there is space). The space you reserve is removed from inventory and held for you (for 3 days hold for me but it took less than a day for JL to confirm the space) so do not be alarmed if the space goes away online if your res is on hold - that is a good thing, it is an indication the space is being held for you. Keep monitoring the res for a change in status while waiting for JL to confirm (only if the website had a glitch when booking) and the res notes will tell you at the top to call in to issue (pay for?) the ticket(s).

Edit:
The 6/9 availability is showing as of 8:50am 7/19. It did not happen at midnight but it did happen sometime between 1am-8:50am.

Technically according to the AS charts there is no Hawaii to Japan or Asia award however it prices as any other North America award. So what you are asking for is North America to North America via Japan so its actually considered a round trip award.

skimthetrees, you were absolutely 100% correct. ^^

logged in this morning at 6:15 PDT and there they were, 5 seats available in economy for 6/9. I called the AS partner desk to change my 6/10 flight to 6/9 but strangely they couldn't see it and said it's not available. I told them I see it online, so I changed it online.

It updated immediately and the AS agent said she see's it confirmed. I didn't have to wait 2-3 days for them to contact JL like I did last week when I booked the 6/10 flight. It went through immediately.

Anyway, all seems to be good as I was able to go to the JL website and choose meals and seats on the flight . (which I presume means I'm ticketed and confirmed).

So thank you for your suggestions in waiting. Why it ended up being this way I don't know, but I'll take it.

Now I just have to wait 5 more days for HND-GMP to open up and get the last leg of my ticket.

Do you know if I can add that part online w/out risking losing my 6/9 seats? (making my OW from SFO-HND into SFO-HND(stopover 5 days)-GMP?)

Thanks again

Great to hear you got the seats! Congrats!

I was not 100% correct. The seats did show today but it did not happen at midnight as I predicted. It happened sometime after 1am in the morning (They were not there at 1am, I went to bed, they were there later in the morning).

I looked at my res and I do not believe you can add a segment online to an existing res directly. You should call it in. You can change individual segments in your res online but it looks to me like if you only have one segment you would have to change that out (give up the space) and book the new trip if there were still space. I personally would not risk this type of change online. I would call it in.

I have done a couple of changes to reservations online and so long as it looked to me like the AS website was designed to handle it I went ahead and tried it and it worked out (once it just worked, they other it failed but left my res intact and told me to call in for assistance with the change) but to me your change looks like the website was not designed to add on a new segment without giving up the old. My educated guess is if you try it online you are at high risk of giving up your reserved space so I would not risk it online.

So long as the HND-GMP space shows on the AS website it should be easy for them to add it to your existing res when you call in.

Thinking about it I have an idea for something that should work online. It requires a little more work on your part. The problem for you currently is you cannot add a new segment. If you already had a second segment in your res you should be able to change only that second segment online (select "keep" for the first segment when you go to change and "change" for the second segment). So...what you could do that has a high probability of online success is to set up a ticket with the structure of a ticket that matches what you want to end up with. You set this up before your 6/15 second segment becomes available on the AS website, then you should be able to change online and not give up the space because you would tell it to "keep" the first segment and "change" the second segment.

If you want to try this, how I would set this up would be to wait until 7/22 so that HND-GMP should show online as bookable for 6/12, then:

Call the partner desk.
Tell them you want to add a flight to your existing res.

1)Add HND-GMP flights departing 6/12 to your tickets. (you do this on 7/22 which is when the 6/12 HND-GMP flights should show up online). Now your tickets will be 6/9:SFO-HND [stop] 6/12:HND-GMP. The new ticket should price at the same number of miles as the current ticket but the taxes will probably be different. We wanted to wait until we could book the 6/12 HND-GMP flights so that we could get the ticket to show a stopover in tokyo. Departing earlier than that would only show as a connection and since our final ticket will have stopover I would try to make the structure look as much like the final ticket as possible. Now you have your ticket setup with SFO-HND on the right date, a stopover in Tokyo, and HND-GMP on a placeholder date that should be easy to change online.

2) Wait until the 6/14 (if that's your date) HND-GMP segment shows available on the AS website which should be early morning 7/24 (for departure 6/14/18). Go online to the res change screen, select to "keep" the SFO-HND 6/9 segment but to "change" the placeholder 6/12 segment and then you should be able to search for HND-GMP on 6/14 (your final date) and replace the placeholder date with the final date online. It is very likely this will work with no issues. If it does not work it should error out and keep your existing res and then you call in to change it.

Like I said, setting it up so you can change it online without giving up the current space takes a bit of setup work. In the long run it is probably not worth the time unless you believe (or fear) that the 15 minutes or so extra it takes to call in the change will cause you to lose the space. There are multiple flights a day HND-GMP and a quick look shows good availability for most days. So long as you do not need a specific flight time for HND-GMP (any flight of the day will work?) then you should be OK waiting to call it in.

[edit] I think I may have interpreted your HND-GMP date wrong - I thought originally you wanted 6/14 but now I am thinking you might have wanted 6/15. If you wanted 6/15 HND-GMP add one day to each HND-GMP date mentioned in the instructions above.

skimthetrees: you have some very creative ideas and great advice.
Our plan is departure 6/15 HND-GMP. I am hoping for the late afternoon flight since I don't want to have to get up super early in the morning for the AM flight nor arrive very late at night for the PM flight.

As you said, availability seems to be pretty good, so my original plan was to just wait until the morning of 7/25 and just call AS to just add it on.

However, perhaps your method might be faster, although a bit more legwork in the beginning. I've never changed a ticket online that has a stopover so it's good to know that there is the option to tell the AS website to keep one portion and change the other rather than dump the whole thing back into the pool.

If we want 4 seats for that mid day flight do you think it's too "risky" to wait and just call it in?

Kept getting the dreaded error -1620 when booking a J ticket next spring, so called in and the agent was able to book it...or so it appears. Have to wait for JL to confirm the ticket - shows as pending in the AS system - and so she said to call back tomorrow afternoon to hopefully get the JL confirmation code.

(Edit: which tracks with process described in this post: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/27611409-post300.html)

It does not look like it is very risky to wait. Other partners can book them as of today so if they do not get taken by the time AS makes them available you should have a good shot (since probably the only people you would be competing with would be AS members otherwise they could have booked the seats already with another program). The only thing that gives me a slight pause is that you need 4 seats and each of the 3 daily flights has only 4 economy seats available right now so if 1 gets taken by someone else then you need a backup plan like taking a different flight or booking however many are available and pay cash or book a separate business class res with miles for the others. There is a ton of biz space on those flights, like 7 or more.

I would try to identify the specific time in the morning when AS makes those flights available each day and call in as soon as possible to add the new flights. Your previous flights were made visible on AS sometime between 1am-6am in the morning (based on me checking at 1am and finding nothing and you checking at 6:15am and booking the flights). Since you are looking for a JL flight on 6/15/18 based on the previous pattern they would show on AS sometime between 1am-6:15am the morning of 7/25/17.

Has anyone else had issues with JL reservations being "locked" to online changes once booking online? AS is asking I call in for changes, but I like having online changes available for looking at other prospective options.

Called back the next day and it was still showing as "Pending" so the agent called a Partner Desk supervisor, who called JL, and the ticket was confirmed.

Now here's to hoping JL upgrades the seats on the 787s flying this route by next spring so that they also have Sky Suites, as I never was able to find an available itinerary (always got "mixed cabin") on the dates I needed that was on a route that uses the Sky Suites instead of the older style business class seats...

Which route are you flying?

Yep, made two JL reservations and neither allowed online changes.

NRT-SAN. The NRT-LAX and NRT-SFO have Sky Suites, as do some of the HND-based flights, but given the dates I had to work with I never did see one of those that wasn't mixed cabin with coach on the transpacific leg.

Ok thanks for the datapoint.

Weird as BA and QF both generally allow changes, and they are OW as well.

LA however :o

SFO runs to HND, not NRT. Good luck! I hope JL gets around to changing the seats, as well as placing SkyWider seats in the back but it sounds from the JAL forum that these routes are lower yields and unlikely to see upgrades anytime soon. Can also add NRT-YVR and KIX-LAX as ones with the older angle flats and narrower economy seats. No F or PY on those routes either.

Are these the dreaded schedule change message or just the disabling of the change button?

If you want to know Search for your confirmation email with the AS confirmation number as it should have the JL confirmation number, You can review the changes on JL site. I booked one recently and a couple days after i received a schedule change. My NRT-ICN change to HND-GMP, seems odd it happened so quick after booking.

I'm actually trying to get rid of the segment, some reason it failed booking when i left as open jaw and would only confirm when i added the leg.

Ah, yes, you're right on the SFO flight. And I do think it'll take a lot of luck - and JL having competition on its SAN route - before my wish comes true!

kayexalate was able to change a JL award online. See his post #213
His was just a date change but at least it is confirmation that some awards can be changed online.

I can confirm that the AS website at least allows me to make changes. Whether those changes go through or not is another question.

I know when I first ticketed my itinerary and during the time AS was waiting to hear back from JL as to my award seat confirmation, it wouldn't let me make any changes and just would tell me to call in.

I could see my itinerary online and I had an AS PNR, but that's about it. When I clicked on anything, it said to call AS partner desk.

After I did that, they said JL confirmed my seats and I was then able to go in and make changes (which I did, changing my departure from 6/10 to 6/9)

When you contacted AS did they have anything to say?

Unfortunately most AS agents I spoke to don't seem to have a good grasp of the website and often blamed IT.

I've found much more helpful information here, from you all. ^^

Thanks for the updates.

My flights confirmed online without calling AS.

Weird.

From what I've gathered through various calls/booking attempts, having to call in is mainly to ticket your reservation because they no longer have the credit card info to be able to charge the taxes/fees. Their system between your initial booking and JAL actually confirming the space/seats did not retain your CC info for some reason or another.

Hi
Im trying to book Business/First SFO to SIN but the HND to SIN leg on JL always show as Economy online.

Is there a way to force the HND-SIN leg to be Biz/F?

edit: oh nevermind, seems there is a lack of availability.
Other dates show Biz seats.

Thanks!

Do the JL F awards from USA to Japan show up on AS about 2 months out?
I see quite a few F seats from NYC to NRT in September but none in Oct/Nov.

Thanks!

They may or may not. It is not specific to AS. Once JL makes inventory available to partners AS will see it.

My take on it is that about 2 months out JL does some waitlist processing. Depending on how many seats are available and how many of these are taken by the waitlist they may start making some seats available around then but more inventory is released much closer to departure, within 14 days.

The way I envision it, around 2 months out JL runs some algorithm that may allocate more seats to award space, probably depends on many factors such as the day of the week, what the flight loads are, how many people on the waitlist, and if the algorithm decides that more award space should be made available they then parse the waitlist and assign new award seats to the waitlist first, after that if there is still award inventory it will be made available to partners. After that at intervals up through departure they re-run their space algorithm and waitlist processing and if warranted release more space to the commoners.

Also, more than 2 months out space may become available if someone holding an award releases it.

I wanted to give my experience using my AS miles to successfully book 4 Economy tickets on a OW itinerary on JL with a stopover (SFO-HND (stopover) - GMP)

I particularly wanted to thank skimthetrees for all the great advice! everything worked out perfectly.

1. I wanted 4 tix on 6/9/18 for SFO-HND but it wasn't showing available on AS website. Ended up booking 6/10/18 online with the hope 6/9/18 would eventually show up. It took 2 days for JL to confirm and ticket.

2. T-325 days out, per skimthetrees recommendation, the 6/9/18 (date I wanted) opened up. (not sure why 6/10, 6/11, 6/12, etc opened up 331 days in advance). I called AS to change my 6/10 to 6/9. they couldn't see 6/9 availability. So I changed it online and it confirmed immediately. Agent acknowledged the change and confirmed it too.

3. Now for the HND-GMP portion. I took skimthetrees advice again and booked a "placeholder" HND-GMP for 6/12/18 by calling AS (T-325 days). Good thing because even at 6AM on a Saturday morning when I called in, I was on hold for 45 minutes before I got an agent. Once I got the agent, it took only a few minutes. Now I had the routing I wanted, and I could change it online when the HND-GMP 6/15/18 seats showed up. The big question is when (what time?) would AS load the JL inventory? Based upon my experience and advice obtained here, I knew it would load sometime between 1:15 AM and 6AM PDT the morning of 7/25 (T-325 days)

4. So I set my alarm for 1:30AM on 7/25 (T-325 days from 6/15) to login and check. 1:30 AM I wake up and login to AS website---No dice, nothing loaded. I go back to sleep and set my alarm again for 45 minutes. Each time I wake up, login and check--nothing loaded. I did this every 45 minutes. Even by 4:45AM nothing loaded. I was getting discouraged (and tired) . finally at 5:30 AM when I logged in, there they were: the 4 tix I needed. Changed online and confirmed, all within about 2 minutes. (much faster than calling in!)

So at least in my case, I narrowed down that AS loads the JL flights sometime between 4:45 AM and 5:30 AM PDT. I hope this helps someone else. I was super tired that day at work (having slept only about 4 hours, waking up every 45 minutes in between), but mission accomplished!

Since JL only had 4 seats for the flights I wanted, I was happy that I was able to grab them.

thanks again everyone for their help!

That is great information that will be useful to many. Thanks for taking the time to share it! I am so glad everything worked out for you. I am sure you will have a great trip!

Trying to book a JL flight and went through all the way until the payment page.
Alaska air then says flight cannot be confirmed and the flight was not booked.

Called customer service and they said the flight might not be available even though the AS website shows as available.

Is that usually the problem?

edit: weird, i tried again and it worked!
Didnt work the first two times.
Looking forward to JL!

sometimes trying multiple times works and sometimes it doesn't

Are married segments required for JL reward tickets like EK?

Traveling from PVG-LAX. Initially I booked PVG-NRT-LAX in business (PVG-NRT is 787, has no FC). Now NRT-LAX shows FC avail, but my PVG-NRT is not avail in business. Called Gold line, they claim they cannot book NRT-LAX segment in FC because PVG-NRT doesn’t have FC.

This makes no sense, because on other days a mixed cabin can be booked.

Hi All,

A little help here? I want to book TPE-NGO-HNL, with a stopover in NGO. All segments are showing available on the Alaska website. I even checked w/ the BA website, and all segments show available there as well. If I book as two one-ways, availability shows up. When I try to do a multi-city, it fails. I called an agent, and after working with this person for almost an hour getting it manually done, the phone disconnected. UGH. I'm hoping for a call back, but I' not optimistic. Here's a question... if I just book the one-way NGO-HNL flight, can I just get them to add the TPE-NGO flight on when I call? I know they'd have to pull a few more miles / dollars out, but would that be an easier way to get the result I'm looking for? Thanks - advice appreciated...