There are quite a few people in the U.S. who have AA miles. However, on the AA website, when you search U.S.-China routes, you can only find AA-operated flights. If you want to redeem AA miles for flights on other airlines, you have to call AA customer service to ticket the award. So how do you search for award space before calling? Today, OneMoreDay will introduce a very effective oneworld award-search tool: the Japan Airlines website.
A quick introduction to Japan Airlines: JAL is an important member of oneworld and serves 229 destinations worldwide. In Greater China, JAL serves Beijing, Dalian, Shanghai, Tianjin, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Taipei, and Kaohsiung.
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Why use JAL to search for award space?
As many readers know, redeeming AA miles for business class between China and the U.S. (55,000 miles one way) and first class (67,500 miles one way) can be a great deal. Besides AA, the other two five-star oneworld airlines serving China-U.S. routes are Japan Airlines and Cathay Pacific. If you want to use AA miles to book award tickets on these two airlines, you need to find the space first and then call AA customer service to issue the ticket. The most common method is to search for award space on the British Airways (BA) website. But BA's award search has several shortcomings:
- BA only shows dates within a month that have space on its own flights, which is not very useful here, because AA awards between China and the U.S. cannot route via Europe. If you want to search JAL or Cathay space, you can only do it one day at a time.
- You can only search point-to-point award space. If you want to search Tokyo to North America, you have to check each destination one by one.
- BA's website uses a date format different from the U.S., and changing dates after the search results appear often causes errors.
- BA is not always accurate for Cathay Pacific business and first class awards; sometimes it shows more award seats than actually exist.
JAL's award search can partially solve these problems. Let me walk through the process.
How to register for a JAL membership number
Go to the JAL U.S. website. One especially unfriendly thing about this site is that the top-right corner of the homepage has a member login, but no option to register! You first need to click “JAL Mileage Bank” in the yellow box shown below before you can see the registration link:
After clicking in, you will see the page below. Click “Enrollment” in the yellow box to register:
The rest is simple: fill in your personal information, set up your PIN, and you will get a membership number.
How to search JAL award space
After logging into your account from the homepage, you will see the following options. If you want to search JAL's own international award tickets, click the area in the yellow box:
On the next page, choose your departure region, departure city, and cabin. For example, if I want to look at first class award space from Tokyo to North America in July, I would select “Japan,” “Tokyo,” and “First,” click “July” in the month field, then scroll down in the calendar until I see “North America” and click it:
The blue circles indicate award availability. For example, we can see first class space from Tokyo to Los Angeles on July 17. If we check BA's website, we can confirm that it is indeed available there as well:
Generally speaking, if both JAL and BA can see the same award space, then AA should be able to ticket it, since they are all in the oneworld alliance (if you are not familiar with airline alliances, see this article).
Compared with BA, JAL has the following advantages when searching its own award space:
- It has a calendar view, so you can immediately see which dates have space and which do not. BA can only search a specific day at a time.
- You can see whether there is space from Tokyo to the entire North America region. I have not seen another search tool with this feature. This is also my favorite thing about JAL's search tool. Why? Imagine that you want to use AA miles to try JAL first class, but you live in New York and there is never any first class space on JAL's New York flights. Then you notice there is space to Chicago. In that case, you could use 67,500 AA miles for a JAL first class ticket to Chicago, then add an AA/US segment from Chicago to New York. As long as your layover in Chicago is under 24 hours, you would not need extra miles. Or you could spend a few days in Chicago and then redeem 4,500 Avios for a ticket from Chicago to New York.
- If you want to change your search criteria, you can simply click Back. BA's site often errors out when you do that.
JAL's search also has a downside: it is not real time. The calendar above only updates once a day. In the example above, the first class seats to Chicago on 7.15 and 7.18 both showed up on JAL, but could not be found on BA. It is possible they were booked after the last update, or that they were only released to JAL members; OneMoreDay leans toward the first explanation. So after you find space on JAL's website, be sure to Double Check it on BA's website.
III. How to search Cathay Pacific award space
If you want to search oneworld partners, click the area in the yellow box below on the member page:
On the next page, suppose I want to look for Cathay Pacific first class award space on HKG-LAX for July 13. In the airline menu, select Cathay Pacific (the options include Cathay, AA, BA, Qantas, and Air France). For the outbound, enter HKG-LAX on July 13. For the return, just enter any date for LAX-HKG. You will then find that there is one first class seat on HKG-LAX for July 13:
BA also finds this seat, which means you can call AA and AA should be able to see and ticket it:
However, BA has a weakness when searching Cathay awards: it may show too many award seats. For example, when I searched for a Chicago-to-Hong Kong flight on July 15 and entered 5 passengers, it still showed business class award space:
When checking with JAL, it showed the correct number of business class award seats: 4.
So how many is too many? According to experts on Fei Cha, if the same flight shows more than 4 business class award seats or more than 2 first class award seats, the result is likely inaccurate. So if you run into that situation, you can use JAL's website to check the correct number. In short, if you want to redeem AA miles for Cathay Pacific flights, remember to search both BA and JAL for a “double check,” so AA customer service will be able to see the award space you found.
Related reading:
Japan Airlines Mileage Guide (2) – Short-Haul Sweet Spots and Single-Partner Award Redemptions