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I know I’ve been writing a lot about my upcoming Round the World trip lately but hey that’s because I’m worrying about it constantly!  I currently have a ticket booked in business class routing through Shanghai for March, but I have been waiting (hoping!) for First Class space on either Japan Airlines or Cathay Pacific to open up.

Because I’m that much of a nerd, I have a spreadsheet where I am tracking the number of seats on a variety of dates in February on a variety of routes to either Tokyo or Hong Kong.  Here’s what it looked when I checked it on Monday

checking-first-class-award-space

I had been pretty consistently seeing space open up on Japan Airlines 2 weeks from departure.  So on Tuesday, 4 seats opened up on the 2/9 flight from JFK-NRT.  Wednesday, I was expecting seats to open up for the 10th, but all day I did not see anything.  I don’t particularly care about February 10th, but I’m just looking for patterns so I know when to jump on the seats for the dates I’m actually wanting to fly!

But….all day nothing showed up for the 10th

MASSIVE availability on Japan Airlines

But then tonight I thought I’d check again, and I DID see availability on February 10th in First Class

ord-nrt-availability-feb-10

Sweet!  Okay, what about the 11th?

ord-nrt-availability-feb-11

Fast forward to March – and there were 2 First Class seats for my exact dates!  I hurried and called and booked them up!

I’m still seeing pretty good availability – here’s 2 seats on JFK-NRT in March

jfk-nrt-availability-mar-8

and I was able to find other dates with First Class availability.  Okay, so maybe it’s not MASSIVE availability, but compared to what I was seeing a few weeks ago (with exactly ZERO anything further than 14 days out), this is pretty good!  If you’re looking to use those AA miles before the mid-March devaluation, now’s the time!


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