This article is reprinted from a WeChat public account run by a reader from our WeChat group, Lazy 33’s Food, Drinks & Fun. Original link. Some subheadings were added by editor ymlulu.

Background

I’d wanted to visit Japan for many years, but earlier plans kept falling through because of visas, timing, the pandemic, and other reasons. During a vacation in 2021, I even called the Japanese consulate several times to ask when visas would reopen, but the answer was always uncertain. Last year I heard Japan was close to reopening, so just to be safe I booked a trip for this year’s spring break, figuring that surely it would happen this time. Sure enough, Japan reopened before year-end, so I quickly locked in the trip.

Getting a 5-year multiple-entry Japan visa in the Seattle area was very easy—honestly one of the smoothest visa applications I’ve done in years. We didn’t feel like going all the way west, so we chose the mail-in option. In just about one week, our passports came back with the 5-year visa affixed.

ANA business class award booking strategy

To maximize this trip, flying lie-flat was obviously the best option. I chose to redeem with ANA miles since it required the fewest miles. Spring break happened to fall in low season, so round-trip business class was only 75,000 miles, but YQ was high, and ANA only allows round-trip bookings. ANA releases US-Japan business class award space about one year in advance, and from what I observed, it seems they may release only two seats at that point (not fully confirmed). But starting about three weeks before departure, more seats tend to appear each day around 9:37-9:47 a.m. PST. Supposedly, these are seats canceled by ANA’s elite members in Japan. I waitlisted about six months in advance. Since ANA waitlists are hard to clear, I also bought Delta economy tickets as a backup—the non-refundable kind that can still be canceled for credit.

Using the waitlist to hunt for seats

To improve my chances, I reserved multiple waitlists: departures a few days before spring break and returns a few days after. As long as your account has the miles, you can join the waitlist. The miles are not deducted when you join, so one mileage balance is enough to hold multiple waitlists.

But that still isn’t enough. As mentioned above, seats tend to open up about three weeks before departure—but the waitlist expires two weeks before the outbound departure date, regardless of when the return is. So if your trip is longer than a week, it’s very possible that only the outbound waitlist clears while the return still hasn’t. In that case, the whole itinerary fails and gets canceled. The workaround is to ticket the itinerary first using a return date that has already cleared, then change the date later. So if you use a reverse-direction waitlist to hold the return space, you can improve your odds of getting a full round-trip. ANA award tickets allow changes to the date and time, but nothing else can be changed—cabin, origin/destination airports, nonstop vs. connection, etc.—and the two flights can be up to one year apart.

Feeling dizzy yet? Let me walk through what I actually did—a heavily simplified version—to make this easier to understand, and also to help myself remember it better.

1) First, place a waitlist for a round-trip SEA-HND itinerary for 4/8-4/16. Let’s call this reservation A.

2) Then place N waitlists for HND-SEA in the reverse direction: 4/9-4/xx, 4/10-4/xx, ..., 4/15-4/xx. The exact later date doesn’t matter. Call these reservation B.

3) Three weeks before 4/8—that is, any day after 3/18—if the waitlist clears, you’ll receive an ANA email around 9:37-9:47 a.m. So in step 1, you can waitlist several outbound dates to improve your odds, such as 4/6-4/16 or 4/7-4/16.

4) At that point, you need to check every morning around that time. A few days later, I got an email saying the SEA-HND waitlist for 4/12 had cleared. I immediately called ANA and first canceled the HND-SEA waitlist for 4/12-4/xx—that is, reservation B. Those three seats were then released immediately, though there is some chance ANA elites could grab them first, in which case they would never make it into the public pool. In my case, things went smoothly and the three seats were immediately returned to the public pool. I then told the agent to change the return on reservation A to 4/12. At that point, itinerary A could be ticketed. Note that you do have to explicitly ask the agent to issue the ticket—the modified itinerary will not ticket automatically—so have a credit card ready. 4.1) At this point I canceled the Delta outbound. In the worst case, I’d still be using 7w5 miles for a one-way lie-flat flight, which isn’t too bad.

5) Since our trip wasn’t actually over on 4/12, the next step was to start checking again beginning three weeks before the return date we really wanted—in my case, three weeks before 4/16 on itinerary A. To improve the odds, you can also watch several nearby dates. In step 2, you can also add more placeholder bookings such as 4/17-4/xx and 4/18-4/xx.

6) Once the waitlist clears for the return date you actually want—for example, in my itinerary, 4/21 cleared—call ANA again and change the HND-SEA date to 4/21. Then the whole trip is set!

7) Happily cancel the Delta economy return ticket.

Key takeaways

Here are a few lessons from this round of seat hunting:

1) Annoying, right? Next time I might still choose ANA, pay a few more miles, and save myself the hassle. But ANA’s own waitlist does have higher priority—they clear the waitlist before releasing seats to the public. The upside is that partner-award space and ANA’s own award space open up at the same time.

2) ANA North America phone agents can have very, very long hold times, but ticketing can only be done while the North America office is open. If you happen to catch availability in the afternoon (which happened to me a few times), you can call the Japan or China service center instead, and things go much more smoothly. North America: 800-235-9262; China: +86-10-8559-9292; Japan: +81-36741-1120.

3) I started checking from early March, and basically every week there were 3-4 days when I could find 3 or more seats. At one point I even passed on a better schedule, thinking I’d be able to get something even better later. But starting one day in late March, all HND-SEA business award space over the following three weeks disappeared within a single day, while SEA-HND still had lots of seats. At first I thought it was temporary, but while I was in Japan I also subscribed to seats.aero to help monitor my return, and only one day briefly showed more than three business seats on 4/23. After that, nothing similar appeared again. My return flight’s business cabin was also much fuller than the outbound, which had been relatively empty. I still can’t tell whether scalpers were grabbing the seats, or whether travel demand really had hit peak levels.

4) Families traveling with kids can pretty much forget about first class. I think two first-class seats is about the practical limit. Business class is also easy enough when you only need one seat, but each additional seat makes it exponentially harder. Bigger families may want to take turns enjoying the lie-flat seats.

NH117 experience (US to Japan)

NH117 was originally scheduled to depart a little after 5 p.m., which is one of my favorite departure times because kids can sleep through most of the flight. But then sometime in February or March, it was suddenly moved up to 12:30 p.m.—not ideal.

ANA business class and Star Alliance Gold used the same check-in lane, and they checked vaccination cards at check-in. Our family had previously lost the little white vaccine card along with a green card, and we never got it replaced. We just printed out the WA Verified vaccination record, and it worked without any issues. Check-in was very smooth. That said, I didn’t really feel the ground service was noticeably better than what you’d get from a US airline.

I didn’t pay much attention to whether there was a premium security lane—we just used our usual clear+TSA Pre.

Once inside, we headed straight for the lounge. ANA uses The Club there, and if I remember correctly, PPS members can also access it. The food wasn’t anything special. We arrived right during the brunch turnover, so both breakfast and lunch were the usual North American lounge staples. We ate a little and it was basically time to board.

My kid insisted on riding in the stroller. Before we even reached the security checkpoint with the stroller, a staff member waved us over to check-in without really checking anything. It also happened to be Easter weekend, and one of the TSA agents gave my kid an egg with a few chocolates inside. It was a completely unexpected surprise, and my kid was thrilled.

The seat layout is a staggered 1-2-1 / 1-1-1 configuration:

https://seatguru.com/airlines/ANA/ANA_Boeing_787-8_V4.php

Other than the paired middle seats, all the other solo seats have extra storage space and a bit more privacy. The middle pair is separated by a divider, so they’re not connected to each other either. Before departure, I checked seat selection and saw that 1A, 1D, and 2C had opened up, so I immediately switched to the first row. If I could have swapped 1D for 2F, that would’ve been even better.

As mentioned earlier, business class on the outbound flight was still pretty empty. NH117 was operated by a 788, and while the aircraft definitely looked like it had some years on it, it was still very well maintained.

They handed out over-ear headphones, and the amenity kit came in a blue leather pouch, which looked much nicer than the cloth pouch Delta used to give out. Inside were an eye mask, earplugs, lip balm, a toothbrush and toothpaste, etc. Toothbrushes, toothpaste, mouthwash, and similar items were also stocked in the lavatory.

The tray table was quite large—great for Japanese meals that come with lots of dishes.

I was seated in 2C, which looked like this:

This was also my kid’s first transpacific business-class flight between the U.S. and Asia since our trip back to China 4 years ago, so having a separate personal space felt very novel.

Changed into the slippers and lay right down...

There was Japanese anime and TV drama to watch, including Crayon Shin-chan, which my partner likes. In-flight wifi was paid, which is one area where it loses to Delta.

My kid’s cup was also specifically for little children.

The flight attendants, while only able to speak a few words of English, were still quite friendly. They brought my kid some 3D origami and a small wooden ANA airplane. On the outbound flight, one flight attendant was especially warm, while the others were a bit icy. The famous kneeling service happened only once while taking meal orders, but the onboard service still easily beat U.S. airlines.

When I went to the lavatory, I remembered I still needed to write this WeChat blog post, so I quickly snapped a photo. Oh, and the toilet was smart too, with a bidet function, although the features were very basic and it wasn’t especially easy to use...

This was what my kid’s 1A looked like.

The little wooden plane was pretty cute, and its wheels could turn.

The flight attendant brought over the menu, and I ordered the limited-time sake offered for March-April. Knowing nothing about alcohol, I took two sips and handed the rest to my partner.

At mealtime, the flight attendant helped set the tablecloth. Since the outbound flight was catered in the U.S., the food was much weaker than what we had on the return from Japan, and the menu was completely different too. You could choose Japanese or Western; we picked Japanese for every meal. My kid’s meals were pre-ordered children’s meals through the website, since I was worried the Japanese option might include raw fish.

I really liked the pea tofu appetizer. The rest still felt a little Americanized to me.

My kid’s appetizer—I didn’t try it, so I have no idea how it tasted.

My kid fell asleep after the appetizer and didn’t eat the hot entrée when it was served. The flight attendant made the bed for my kid; everyone else had to make their own. The mattress pad and blanket were separate, and the mattress pad added quite a bit of comfort.

But he did wake up for the ice cream...

Our main course came with rice, miso soup, steamed fish, and side dishes. I thought it was all pretty average; my partner thought it was decent. In any case, it was still better than Delta. For dessert, I asked for fruit. There was a pretty long wait before each course, which made me really sleepy.

This is what the 3D origami looked like when finished—pretty cute.

Not long after falling asleep, my kid woke up and said he wanted something to eat, so I ordered him Ippudo ramen. It smelled so good that it made me want some too.

He was absolutely loving it.

You could also order things like a pork rice bowl.

I happened to have an upset stomach before departure, so I didn’t have much of an appetite. The fish at breakfast was too fishy, so I gave what I couldn’t finish to my partner.

This was dinner, photographed by my partner.

The window didn’t have a pull-down shade; instead, it used buttons to adjust the tint, though the response was a bit sluggish.

After breakfast, we were finally almost there! As we got close to Tokyo, my kid’s legs started hurting and he cried loudly the whole time. He was still crying during landing, and because our seats were too far apart, I couldn’t really comfort him... On the return, I made sure to carry Tylenol with me, though he ended up being calm the whole way back.

The return-flight experience was pretty different.

You can still use the business-class check-in line, but there is no dedicated fast-track lane for business-class passengers at security. However, next to the ANA check-in counters there’s a facial-recognition machine that even economy passengers can use. Once you register, you can use the fast lane. When we tried, a staff member said our kid was too young and couldn’t go through. I pointed out that the kid had already registered successfully, and then the staff member let us into the fast lane anyway, looking just as confused as we were. We got through in basically no time. I’m not sure whether tickets from other airlines would work. Recently I saw a WeChat post saying security lines at Haneda can stretch for hours; when we looked, the line really was quite long, so this facial-recognition machine is worth keeping an eye out for.

At HND security, you have to stand with your feet spread wide apart on two footprints on the floor. Even kids have to do it. I felt like if my kid were any shorter, he wouldn’t even be able to reach the footprints...

The ground staff didn’t tell us where the lounge was, so we had to go in and check the map. HND T3 isn’t very big. There are 2 ANA lounges and 1 Star Alliance lounge. We picked the ANA lounge closer to gate 106B. Showers are available, but you need to make a reservation. Inside the lounge, you can scan a QR code for mobile ordering, and the food is ready in just two or three minutes. We ordered ramen, yam soba, and curry rice. I thought the yam soba would be cold, but it turned out to be hot; it was decent. The curry rice was pretty good too.

Besides that, there were also some snacks in the self-serve area, though most of them skewed pretty American.

This time, my partner was too lazy to unfold the stroller for boarding, so we didn’t use the priority lane and just boarded with the other business-class passengers.

NH118 Experience (Japan to the U.S.)

For the return flight, we chose seats in the last two rows: 8H, 9G, and 9,000. Since the boarding door on this aircraft is behind row 5, if you choose one of the last 4 business-class rows, you’ll have a steady stream of economy passengers walking by after boarding, which isn’t very convenient. On top of that, being in the last row means you’re very close to the first row of premium economy, so there’s also a chance of being disturbed. But as I mentioned earlier, this return segment was very full, so there weren’t any other seats to choose from. We had to take these three.

After boarding, they again started us off with a glass of juice or sparkling wine.

Once the tablecloth was laid out, it felt like we waited forever before they even started taking orders, and then the meal service itself took a long time too. By the time we finished eating, we’d already been in the air for two or three hours. As someone who was dying to go to sleep, I thought it was really too slow...

The snack was already better than on the outbound: a matcha chocolate pastry, and it was tasty.

The return-flight meals were created by Chef Okuda of Ginza Kojyu (I think?). Firefly squid in April somehow ran through our entire Japan trip. The beef and sashimi were both very good as well.

The kid’s meal also looked a lot more appetizing this time. Because my kid didn’t eat the hot meal on the outbound, I misremembered and thought he only had one course on the return too. So while he was eating the cold meal, I gave him melatonin. Then when the hot meal arrived, he was too sleepy to eat it... Still, he more or less finished the cold meal.

This was the hot meal. My kid ate the onsen egg, and my partner and I split the rest.

For dessert, I ordered the strawberry cake. It was good and not too sweet. It also came with a piece of chocolate.

The return flight departed in the afternoon, so after dinner it was about time to sleep. I had a great sleep, and when I woke up it was just about time for breakfast.

Breakfast was again steamed fish, miso soup, small side dishes, and rice, but it tasted better than on the outbound.

My kid’s meal also looked pretty appetizing.

Not long after breakfast, it was already time to land. Thanks to the departure time and shorter flight time on the return, it felt like we arrived before I’d slept enough. I was left wanting more.

For short flights, the difference between the premium cabins and economy really isn’t that big. But on a long transpacific flight, once you fly business class, you really don’t want to go back to economy. Sleeping comfortably the whole way and arriving refreshed to start the trip makes for a completely different experience.

Time to keep earning more points~

About the Author

This article is reposted from the WeChat public account of a reader from our WeChat group, Lazy 33’s Food, Drink, and Fun. The articles are all original and very good, so if you’re interested, feel free to follow them.