You are currently viewing Japan Airlines Expands Chicago, San Diego, And LA Flights – Is This Your Best Shot At Asia Award Space? – View from the Wing

Japan Airlines Expands Chicago, San Diego, And LA Flights – Is This Your Best Shot At Asia Award Space? – View from the Wing


Japan Airlines has announced a second Chicago flight, more flights between San Diego and Tokyo and between Los Angeles and Osaka, and that the new product Airbus A350 will start flying to Los Angeles. That’s important if you’re looking for award space to Asia.

Japan Airlines announces U.S. route updates:
• Resume Tokyo Narita (NRT) to Chicago (ORD) route starting May 31
• Increase NRT to San Diego (SAN) from 4x to 7x weekly starting March 30
• Increase Osaka (KIX) to Los Angeles (LAX) from 5x to 7x weekly from July 18
• Begin… pic.twitter.com/msupMkknW6
— Ishrion Aviation (@IshrionA) January 21, 2025

Adding a Tokyo Narita flight from Chicago O’Hare means effectively doubling capacity to Tokyo, and with a flight that’s likely to attract lower premium sales than the flight to close-in Haneda airport. More capacity and with a less popular flight should be good for awards, and Chicago space has historically been easier to come by than flights out of most of their other gateways.
The Japan Airlines Boeing 787 serving Los Angeles – Osaka has been an inferior product, but it used to be a reliable award – a flight I could find space on when nothing else was available. That hasn’t been the case in some time.

Meanwhile, more flights out of San Diego means more capacity which should mean more unsold seats and therefore better award space.
What’s more, I’ll be watching for these flights to load into the schedule. New flights are often good for award space. They don’t have advance bookings in the system. The additional flying starts soon – not a lot of lead time to generate sales or awareness. Additional flying can take awhile to generate an average level of ticket sales.
As a result we often (but not always) see good award space when flights are loaded into a system. And we’ve seen good award availability in the past when Japan Airlines has increased capacity on a route (for instance, swapping a plane from a Boeing 787 to a 777).

And I suspect a lot of frequent flyers will be watching Los Angeles for the move from a Boeing 777 to an Airbus A350 with the carrier’s new first class product. I do not expect that schedule load to mean award space, but it’s worth setting alerts nonetheless.
Award travel to Japan, and Asia broadly, has been tough and fares have been generally expensive. A surprising major reason for this is the slow pace at which flying between the U.S. and China.
Prior to the pandemic, there was far more capacity between the U.S. and China than was warranted by consumer demand. China has a policy where any given route can only be served by one of their airlines – a policy meant to limit competition actually spurred a gold rush where Chinese airlines would squat routes in case they wanted to fly it at some point in the future.
That meant a lot of flights with few passengers, and cheap connecting fares throughout Asia as a result. That capacity hasn’t returned. Any additional Asia flying at this point is great for customers!
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Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel – a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the “World’s Top Travel Experts” by Conde’ Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
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JAL (and ANA) are phenomenal carriers, so more capacity with them between the US and Japan is always welcome. As for this particular route, I personally prefer Haneda, but if an extra NRT flight leads to more partner award space (via AA, Alaska, etc.), then I’m all for this. JAL also has reliable, high-quality connections to much of east Asia (think ICN, SIN, HKG, MNL, BKK, HAN, SGN, DPS), including business lie-flat for under $5K/person roundtrip (of course, redeeming points instead is always great). The lounges in NRT and HND are excellent, too. And the on-board food and service are far superior to US carriers. Pro-tip: Order the ‘Japanese’ meals–They’re exceptional.
Thanks Gary. What alerting tool are you using to watch these flights to load into the schedule? I’d like to do the same but don’t know the best way to go about this.
Any idea when these open for sale?
I’m really disgusted with premium class availability on AA and it’s partners.
Of course I want to redeem on QR, CX, JL, QF.
You only needed to be a little bit flexible and you could generally get a premium seat.
Now, you look on calendar searches for first and business and there is nothing for months if ever.
I recently decided against booking my family on AA (I class) and just decided to fly on a much less expensive Southwest flight. What should I pay a premium of over $600 per person? I would consider it if the redemption possibilities were decent but they just aren’t – unless you want economy.
I’m glad, due to the new lifetime Million Miler status, that I don’t feel they need to buy AA.
I know it’s probably no better with UA and DL. I
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Gary LeffGary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel — a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the “World’s Top Travel Experts” by Conde’ Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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