point fu

Just enough time for a full dinner and a couple rounds of mahjong and you're there PROS vast, if a bit crowded, lounge with a full dining setup turn-left boarding wi-fi personal air vents take-what-you-need amenity basket cuts down on waste small cabin feels quiet and private Toto Washlet toilets onboard!  Hakushu whisky! CONS departs when the airport is at its busiest (6pm) no pre-departure beverages HOW I DID IT 14,500 Amex points + $57 for a flight that was retailing for $1900 – not too shabby!   Airport and Lounge We took the Keisei Skyliner to Narita (when we arrived in Japan we'd purchased the round-trip + 24-hour Tokyo Metro pass ticket package I talked about in this post ). The schlep to Ueno from Ebisu on the Yamanote line was a little irritating with all of our bags, but it wasn't rush hour so it wasn't too bad. And it was definitely better than paying US$250 for a taxi. For international flights I find it tedious to do online...

Both Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airlines base their fuel surcharges on jet fuel price indices (as I pointed out last year ). They've just announce d that the surcharges are being slashed by 60% for tickets issued in April and May. According to NHK, they review the surcharge rates every two months. This should bring the copay on their super-affordable Economy reward tickets back down to the $100 range.

We're going to Japan to ride the Shiki Shima train and I've booked the long legs of the trip : New York to Hong Kong and then Taipei to New York (we're bookending the trip to Japan with long weekends in two of our favorite places). But now we need to book the short legs between those two places and Japan. One of my weak spots with booking award travel is doing crazy-but-legal routings and stopovers. I'd used British Airways points for the Hong Kong leg, and BA prices all award travel by leg so there were no points to be saved by spending an hour on the phone with a call center trying to get an agent to book me a single flight with a multi-day layover in Hong Kong en route to Japan. ( TIP: There's a great online Avios calculator here ). Hong Kong to Tokyo I priced out the flights and found a lot of Ultra Low Cost Carriers (ULCC) offering this flight for US$150-ish (a.k.a. $350 once you pay the surcharges for seats, bags, oxygen, and toilets ), but we wanted t...

Japan Airlines just launched a new tool to help you figure out where to sit if you want to see Mt. Fuji from the air. Just enter your flight info and it'll tell you which side to sit on. 🗻✈️ ➡️ My other posts about Japan .

(updated June 2018) I've read for years that researchers had found that selective fasting can help alleviate jet lag but I'd never tried it until this trip. The idea is simple: a day or two before you depart, you figure out when you'll be asleep in the new time zone and you fast during your pre-bedtime and sleeping hours. We were taking JAL's 787 service ( trip report here ) leaving Tokyo at 6pm, this meant that we had a late breakfast and then had to fast until they started serving food on board (ca. 8pm). My husband's "hangry" fits are legendary. Like I actually carry around power bars and nuts with me entirely on the off chance he gets low blood sugar and turns into a Snickers commercial. But he loves sleep more than anything so he fully volunteered to try this if it meant better sleeping when we got back. Not eating from like 11am until 8pm was tough for both of us, but the anec-data here is that we both had virtually no jet lag . From what I...

TL;DR   This flight is exactly what you want from a Business Class trip: great lounge, good food, good liquor, a comfortable bed, Wi-Fi, and a bit of entertainment, all politely and professionally executed.  COST 105,00 Avios points + $145 in fees per person Cash cost would have been $5800 (i.e., 5.2¢ per point) How I did it PRO row 1 still has the same stowage and space as other Business Class rows the seat design is a nice middle ground between intimacy and privacy.  787 has higher humidity and cabin pressure, plus it's much quieter and has bigger windows  one of the few British Airways Avios redemptions that doesn't have astronomical co-pays toto washlets  better bedding that ANA Business Class  (my review of their competing flight here ).  CON even in a new terminal, they boarded the whole plane through the front door the window seat can be a bit claustrophobic  no personal air vent controls (aka gaspers) no pajamas ...

We've been planning a big 3 month visit to Japan for a while now and even though it's 9 months away, it's time to start shopping for flights. If you want to fly on points you tend to have the best luck if you plan really far in advance or if you're super flexible and travel last-minute. UPDATE! 6/2016 Trip Reports: ANA First to Narita JAL Business to JFK We like to fly together on the same ticket so we're processed together if something goes wrong (e.g., mechanical or weather delay), but looking at our various mileage accounts, we're in the same boat as last time we went to Japan – we don't have enough points in one single account to book two round-trips. This means we'll likely end up doing two one-ways to Japan on one airline and two one-ways back on another . Furthermore, given that buying a one-way ticket to/from Asia with money usually costs as much or more than a round-trip does, we have to successfully book both legs of the trip with m...

So it's looking like my brother has settled on Tokyo Sakura Festival as the site for his big 4-0 celebration. While the whole country goes nuts celebrating the arrival of the cherry blossoms, it's definitely on my bucket list to brave the crowds and do that in Japan once in my life. The big challenge on this is that he can't commit to specific dates until February at the earliest. This makes finding award seats challenging. I'm thinking my only real hope is snagging some of the award inventory that airlines sometimes release at the very last minute (like less than 5 days from departure). But if you're going on a 3 week trip, that means you'll depart without a return ticket and you'll have to get up every day of your vacation and poke around award inventory and hope you can find yourself a seat home. Not exactly a relaxing proposition . Also, flights to and from Asia tend to be priced such that one way tickets are often more expensive than round-trips, so ...