When I can plan my DONE4 using JAL????
 

Hello:

I will be buying my RTW out of BKK for a cruise booked in July....It is relatively certain and I would like to organize and buy this sometime in Feb/March as Summer season in Europe is busy. Any idea when I will be able to book this using JAL on some of the segments?

Thanks!

Probably around 1 April.

But in the meantime, there's no harm in trying to make reservations on the flights you need independent of the ticketing. This may depend on the clout of your TA / Airline desk to hold reservations without a ticket number.

Does JL use D and A inventory in the OW way? I haven't bothered to check since it doesn't affect me, but there is a good chance that part of joining OW for JL is to adjust there fare buckets. In which case you might not be able to book prior to JL starting its preparations. We know that JL cannot join prior to EI leaving (which is April 1), so that is the earliest possible date (and hopefully also the latest!). MA and RJ can join at any time. OW has never announced a date, other than "early 2007".

It currently uses D for Business, A for economy.

Wow. I guess that makes it easy to get A inventory, but a bit of a shock when getting on the plane. How will JL adjust this? They cannot just A to be first, with a year's worth of bookings hanging out there? It suggests that A will be manually booked (and it will be A0 on all JL flights after JL joins). With JL participating on GE fares, there must be some mechanism in place already on JL, but the volume of tickets is low.

Wouldn't it be simpler, if they decide they need to align booking codes (which AFAIK is not a one world requirement), to simply change the booking code on every booking for travel effective the chosen date for change over?

JAL's booking class
 

http://www.jal.co.jp/en/globalfare/rule.html

is good starting point.

For Global Explorer,
First - F
Business - D
Economy - B

Fisrt class bookig class is same as normal first calss.
As you can see in Expert flyer and other site,
JAL flights only procide F inventory for frist class.

I think it is a Oneworld requirement. I remember AA going through some painful changes in booking codes about 5 years ago that made very little sense except that it matched up to other OW airline usage. However AA does use A as both an upgrade and revenue class (which causes considerable grief on AA's system).

JL cannot just change the booking code on existing tickets as some of them are paper and not easily changed. Maybe time to buy some JL economy tickets in A and see if they turn into F seats.

Wow, F and B inventory on OWE tickets would be awesome -- also zero chance of that happening. I guess JL must have a lot of work in becoming able to join the OW alliance. Having F inventory is heaven! It never occured to me to check the GE fare classes, suddenly GE ticket is a lot more attractive!

Why not? I've had paper tickets on other airlines when they've changed booking codes and still ended up in the right cabin seamlessly.