You did well for your first booking. There have been many instances of JAL cancelling flights or rescheduling flights to make connections invalid and in those cases, after being contacted by the AS JAL liaison, JAL will open space on other JAL flights. Your case is different. In your case AS flights were canceled by AS. JAL technically does not have responsibility to rebook here, but maybe at AS's urging they will. What should have happened is AS should have booked you on alternate flights to meet your original JAL flight, or, as what the agent tried to do, rebook for a different flight with space available. Unfortunately, your AS agent tried to book you on a JAL flight that did not have confirmed space available and also canceled your original flight. This really is AS's mistake and if this were a fair world AS would fix it. I don't know what they will do here. My guess is they will ask JAL to fix the AS blunder and if JAL does not agree that AS likely will tell you they cannot fix it. I would push back hard and escalate up the supervisory chain if they do you dirty like that, asking to speak with a supervisor and explain how AS made the mistake of canceling your original JAL F flight without your permission and they need to fix it. If they do not then this definitely warrants filing a DOT complaint. Please update us on the outcome.

One recommended procedure is to not call the regular reservation line, which has a pool of agents, some of which are not well trained on handling issues with partner reservations. Call the partner desk phone number (should be found in this thread somewhere) during regular AS Seattle business hours for best results.

 

skimthetrees you always gave great advice and are quite knowledgeable about JAL in general. Are you familiar with how JAL operates in the summertime? Looking at flights in summer 2025 and they seem to not be releasing as often. I am checking CX before schedule is open for Alaska and only see Tuesday and Wednesday released in June and they are getting snatched up rather quickly.

Edit: This is specific to BOS-TYO routing. JFK seems to be releasing 1-2F almost every day.

 

I am not that familiar with the current release trends other than to say JAL is releasing much fewer seats in advance than they used to so they do get taken more quickly. I did look at BOS-TYO and NYC-TYO for next year. BOS-NRT has 1 daily flight. NYC-TYO has 5 daily flights (multiple carriers). You do the math. There is a fair bit of competition on NYC-TYO, on BOS-NRT there is none, so your odds of getting seats are maybe 5 times more from NYC than BOS. Also, JAL has a 789 scheduled from BOS which does not have F, so you will always be finding 0 F seats from BOS. If you are looking for non-stop F your odds are infinitely greater from JFK than from BOS.

 

That seems to be the case. They used to release 4J for BOS-TYO but now it seems to be 2 at CX open on selected days and none additional once AA/Alaska opens. Thanks for your insight as always.

 

does Alaska Airlines get special access JL inventory that isn't available to other OW partners like BA, AA, etc...? I'm seeing some premium economy seats on JL flights that aren't being made available to BA or AA.

 

More likely it is JAL allocating different award inventory to different partners in some cases. So, in some cases, the AS allocation may have inventory still available in its allocation but AA or BA may not, and vice versa. I have seen this in the reverse direction with some close in F inventory in the past. AA had JL F available, AS did not, so I would not be at all surprised to see a similar situation with PE inventory.

 

An update:

Looks like I got my desired outcome!

SFO-HND F on Nov28, confirmed on JAL as well.
I received an updated itinerary by email but didn't receive any calls/emails from AS.

I had called one of the partner desk phone numbers the next day to give them more details. It seems they were able to amend my initial request/complaint with my request: YYC-SEA-SFO Nov27 and SFO-HND Nov28 as the optimal outcome, but would settle for SFO-HND Nov29 if not possible. I'm not sure if this second phone call is what made the difference.

Thanks for your advice @skimthetrees!

 

Exellent! Thanks for taking the time to update us on your result. This gives others in a similar situation hope that it can be fixed and a roadmap for how to navigate the process. I would say the most important thing you did was to ask for the JAL confirmation before the original call ended causing the agent to then realize before the call ended that it was Alaska's (her) mistake.

 

just to close the loop on this. I did see PY availability show up later that day on AA. I noticed today that AS is selling JL married segment awards, which is new to me on AS. This also means that these awards are not available on any of the other partners like BA, AA. Didn't check CX.

 

Sounds like the PY difference you saw was due to different programs having differences in the way they cache award availability (they don't all have live availability on award searches).

AS has had married segment awards on JAL for a long time. What routings were you seeing with differences? In the past I have seen what initially was assumed to be AA not showing a married segment routing, but actually turned out to be AA not allowing the award due to not meeting its award routing rules.

 

search March 8 ITM-JFK(married segment only) You�ll see award for 75k all in J and on JAL. AA doesn�t have ITM or HND to JFK award in J for that date.

 

Thanks. This is very interesting. Are these bookable?

I know AA does married segments. AS definitely is showing a different allotment for availability here than AA. Could be this is an error on JAL's side making this available to AS? Or, could be AS has some new agreement with JAL giving it more married segment availability? Hard to tell at this point but this definitely expands the possibilities if these are actually bookable. If they are not bookable it's just another example of phantom space.

 

Definitely bookable. Was issued ticket#. Waiting to see if I get the $12.50 refund for partner booking (cancelled it within 24hrs). I tried calling AS to see if they could drop the ITM-HND segment so I could just fly HND-JFK. They said no unless there was availability for just the HND-JFK sector which there isn't. Truly married segment.. This goes back to my earlier question on whether AS has an arrangement with JL for extra JL award availability. I don't think AA does married segment for JL flights. I think they do it for other partners.

 

I have seen AA respect JL married segments in the past. Unless something broke I am pretty sure AA does handle JL married segments.

Does AS get extra award availability? I would say they get what they contract for. Is that more than AA? You'd have to look at the contracts to know. I can say that AS is not the only partner with access to this space. I see it available via CX and QF also. Sometimes availability differences can be due to Point Of Sale differences. My understanding in the past was that AS always used US POS. I don't know how AA handles POS (always US? Point of origin?), so it's unclear to me whether that is a factor here, but it could be a possibility.

 

I searched for J awards for next Spring a few weeks ago but couldn't find anything except those ridiculous JX prices. But thanks to your posts, I searched today keeping married segments in mind and was able to easily find a J award to BKK with an overnight layover in TYO. (Gosh, I hope I don't oversleep...) And I also handily found a J award from CTS (I was going there anyway) to DFW, whereas there was nothing showing direct to or from TYO. I couldn't replicate the outbound on either AA or BA, but the return is available on BA for 110,250 Avios + US$286.90; didn't check with any other program. Thank you!