Score: Booking Four Japan Airlines First Class Award Seats!

As I recently wrote about, we’re taking a winter ski trip to Niseko, Japan, staying at four different points properties. I’ve already shared the return portion of the trip that I booked, where I’ll be flying ANA’s A380 first class and Hawaiian’s 787 first class. However, I didn’t finalize the outbound portion of the trip until last minute, for good reason.

While the product review might not be that original, I think most people will appreciate the quantity of first class award seats that we managed to book…

Booking half a Japan Airlines first class cabin with points

When I take my review trips and book flights in international first class, people sometimes make one of two points:

• “You’re traveling alone, so this award availability isn’t useful for those who travel as couples or families, since it’s hard to find first class availability for multiple people”
• “You have the flexibility to travel whenever, so first class awards aren’t useful for those who need to be somewhere on a specific day”

I hear you, but I’ll counter the point by saying that we just snagged four Japan Airlines first class award seats on a single flight from San Francisco (SFO) to Tokyo (HND), on the exact date we needed. And we paid just 80,000 American AAdvantage miles plus $5.60 per person in taxes.

Let me provide a bit of background. We’re going skiing with friends, and of course we were perfectly happy flying there separately, and just meeting in Japan. Japan is not exactly an easy destination to redeem miles to. Our hotel reservations were for specific dates, and with hotels in ski season needing to be canceled 60 days in advance, we had very little flexibility.

So we did what I usually recommend — we locked in business class awards in advance that we were happy with (with AAdvantage miles, so there were no redeposit fees), and then kept checking closer to departure to see if anything better opened up.

Long story short, the persistence paid off, and four first class award seats opened up on the same flight, around four days before departure. My apologies to the other first class passenger.