Japan Airlines has made major changes to their frequent flyer program starting in 2024 by introducing a new Life Status program, and tweaking the membership requirements for JAL Global Club. There likely was an overabundance of elites who qualified for lifetime elite benefits by earning JAL Sapphire once, and JAL wanted to rectify the situation (see blog post by TRAICY).
I fortunately was able to qualify for JAL Sapphire through the Fly On program in 2023, and as a Japanese resident applied for JAL Global Club membership by switching my credit card to a JAL Global Club card. While JAL promised that members who were JAL Global Club members in 2023 would keep their status, it remained to be seen how exactly JAL would implement this. We weren’t sure if membership would continue past 2024 just for holding a JAL Global Club credit card or living outside Japan and renewing with miles.
TagJAL
NH 8 NRT-SFO on March 16, 2018
Booking
This was the return flight for a roundtrip booking I made via Virgin Atlantic where we flew the first flight in May 2017. The points were transferred from Membership Rewards with the 30% bonus, and cost a total of 110k Virgin Atlantic miles plus $170 for the roundtrip. Divided equally between the two legs, that makes this flight 55k miles and $85. The value of the flight at time of booking was $9,920 for a cpm of 15.62. Since it is unrealistic to actually pay nearly $10k for a flight, the cheapest non-stop economy flight was $736.50 for a “real” cpm of 1.16. Prices for roundtrips are probably cheaper but let’s keep things simple for now…
I should also note that I upgraded my husband’s NRT-SFO flight because he was originally booked in business class and flew the first leg SFO-NRT in business class (it wasn’t a big deal, we were basically one row apart and the menus/experience were very similar). When I saw F space open up, I called Virgin Atlantic and upgraded for 10k miles and a change fee of $50. I am glad this worked out, as you’ll see later.
Getting to the airport
We stayed at Hyatt Centric Ginza in Tokyo, so we took the Asakusa line from Shimbashi station all the way to Terminal 1 of NRT (it turns into Sky Access at some point). The walk to the station from the hotel took about 8-10 min and the train ride took about 1 hour and cost around 1300 yen. I do wish Google Maps was a little more descriptive on how to get to the platform for the train bound for the airport, but fortunately there were signs that mentioned the airport train. The timing of this train was approximately every 30 min, and we arrived at the platform out-of-breath with about 30 seconds to spare. I would recommend checking the schedule ahead of time and giving yourself enough time to look for the platform while dragging your luggage…
A couple other options are the Keisei Skyliner or airport limousine (the 1000 yen one shown on Google Maps).
Food court tsukemen detour
Against my husband’s strong protests of cutting into our lounge time and free food stomach space, I dragged us to the Terminal 1 food court on the 4th floor between the two Departure Halls (landside) to eat tsukemen at the famous ramen shop Tomita (the original shop is #1 on RamenDB) that my friend Forrest tipped me off to as a relatively new and convenient addition to the NRT food court. I would highly recommend making a pit stop here if you are not flying premium class, or if you are but don’t care for lounge food. For us, good free lounge food such as that offered by JAL and ANA trumps the ramen, but I would not hesitate to drop by if I had been flying economy.
ANA Suite check-in
ANA first class has a private check-in suite in the airport that is large and spacious. We didn’t know about it at first, so we went to the ANA portion of the Departure Hall where an agent told us to print baggage tags from a kiosk. We did so, only to find out later it was a waste of time. Then another agent told us to go to the business class line, and when we got there, another agent directed us to the first class check-in suite. Once there, I handed over our printed baggage tags to the agent, and they gave me wet towels and offered me hard candy (cough drops). I thought that was a nice touch. The check-in suite was simple but the little extra touches did make it feel calm and nice compared to the zoo outside in the Departure Hall with long lines and having to dodge tons of tourists rolling their giant bags into you.
Security and Immigration/Customs
From the private check-in, the agent leads you to the back of the check-in suite to a private security screening. I liked this because there is nobody in front of you, nobody behind you. No need to rush and nobody getting all up in your space. Relatively minor detail for most people, but I appreciated it.
The security led us right into Immigration/Customs, for which there were no lines for the Foreigners. Sweet! We stopped by the TTP booth to ask about our status, since we applied for the e-gate program more than 3 months ago, but they said that we’re still in preliminary processing and it could take another 3 months before secondary.
Lounge
We went to the ANA Lounge, which has a business class and first class (Suite Lounge) side. We checked out both and honestly, they were fairly similar in terms of spaciousness, crowdedness, food options, noodle bar and hot entrée options, and style. The first class side had a higher quality tea and Haagen Dazs ice cream, which I did not notice on the business class side. The bathrooms have Shiseido products you can use.
The food options were pretty good, but unfortunately I was already half full from the tuskemen earlier, so all I could eat was a curry udon, which was yummy. I also had a bite of the burger that my husband ordered, which was okay, but I chastised him for ordering American food when it’s our last few hours in Japan. 😛 I am a huge fan of gyudon (the beef bowl in the menu below – thinly sliced, marinated beef brisket over rice) and would’ve also liked to order the chicken curry, ramen, and sashimi over rice (chirashi bowl). But another thing I liked about this lounge is the number of small packaged snacks, etc. You catch my drift? 😉
Last-minute shopping
I usually don’t do any airport duty-free shopping, but this is Japan and I had so many Japanese snacks I wanted! I left my things in the lounge (fyi there are no lockers) and went out to the terminal to shop at Fa-So-La and the other shops. I realized I loved shopping in Japanese airports because:
AwardFinder is a App for the Chrome browser that brings the power of many airline award search engines to one convenient place. It also adds additional features on top of the official airline search engines, such as the ability to search multiple cabins, multiple origins / destinations, save your searches, and more!
You can see a full list of features here.
Here’s an example search, from SFO (San Francisco) to TYO (Tokyo airports NRT, HND) using the ANA (NH) and British Airways (BA) search engines on October 26, 2016 + 2 days.
As you can see, I’ve found availability on multiple days on JAL and some on American Airlines. The class letters are F for First, J for business, W for premium economy, and Y for economy. You can’t actually book premium economy using American miles, unfortunately. Normally for British Airways search I just pick Business and Economy, as the actual British Airways search will cover all classes with those selections. For ANA it doesn’t seem to matter, so Business and Economy tends to cover all my bases. The British Airways engine will also show the number of seats that are available in each class for those looking to book for multiple people, but not all engines will do so. I would also suggest looking for 1 person at first before looking for multiple people to see what availability is like.
The supported search engines are ANA, Air Canada, and Singapore Airlines for Star Alliance, British Airways, JAL, and Qantas for Oneworld, and Etihad. Singapore and Qantas will show better availability for their own flights when using their miles.
You have to input your own frequent flyer info into most of the engines in order to use them, and you can do so by clicking the blue Set Up link by engines you haven’t set up yet.
I do trust the developer, but I would suggest using alternate fake accounts for the frequent flyer programs you care about.
I like AwardFinder because manually searching on multiple engines is very inconvenient, and it can lay out multiple days of availability in multiple classes in an easy to read format. At least for the ANA website, to admit the truth, I can’t even figure out how to get to the Star Alliance partner availability search anymore.
Some of the downsides is that it has no SkyTeam availability search, and can’t do calendar searches. Furthermore, since the app is doing the searches live for you, it isn’t terribly fast. But overall its very useful and a big improvement over searching day by day searches over multiple engines.
Some specific usage notes:
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