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!