Business Class Awards To Asia Have Been Brutal. Star Alliance’s EVA Air Just Opened A New Way To Get There

EVA Air has been one of the most reliable ways to get premium cabin awards to Asia, and they have a very good business class product. However, those awards haven’t been available with partner miles. You’ve needed to use their own points.

• The best availability by far has been on their Seattle flight, but other flights like Chicago have had good availability.
  
• They appear to practice journey control, so connecting itineraries over Taipei have been more available than just booking the non-stop.

You can actually gain access to EVA Air’s miles via bank transfer partners:

1. Capital One has a 30% transfer bonus to EVA Air through July 31, 2026. However, normally Capital One transfers 1,000 points into 750 EVA Air Infinity MileageLands miles, so this just gets up to near parity at 1,000 to 975.
   
2. Citibank transfers to EVA Air at 1:1.

What’s new is that EVA Air does appear to be releasing business class award seats reliably to partners now – at seven days prior to departure. This was flagged by award search tool Roame.

EVA releasing multiple seats to Aeroplan T-7
by
u/tim_roame in
pointstravel

Tim Qin of Roame.Travel flags “Surprisingly, some routes like ORD even had 8 seats available through Aeroplan.” I wouldn’t bank on this continuing yet but a T-7 release is interesting, helpful and encouraging to see given how difficult business and first class awards to Asia have become.

One of the most reliable other ways has been Japan Airlines using JAL’s own miles, but since JAL became transfer partners with Capital One and Bilt we’ve seen less availability on their flights unfortunately – even at the extra miles level.

Before the pandemic there was way too much capacity over the Pacific, plenty of unsold seats, and easy award availability. That was largely because of the number of China flights – airlines were squatting on those betting that one day they’d become valuable. Chinese airlines aren’t allowed to fly the same long haul routes as each other.

So they’d start silly ones, to prevent others from taking them. The market didn’t support them, so they sold connecting flights across Asia dirt cheap and pulled traffic away from other airlines as well. (The days of those $400 roundtrips in coach to Thailand are long gone.)

With so little flying between the U.S. and China these days, airlines are able to hold strong yields on these routes and they release far less award space. U.S. airlines have also lobbied the government to keep the breaks on U.S. – Chinese flying, and demand for this flying is also far less than it used to be as tensions between the two countries remain elevated.