TravelingForMiles.com may receive commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on TravelingForMiles.com are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. TravelingForMiles.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers.
Some links to products and travel providers on this website will earn Traveling For Miles a commission that helps contribute to the running of the site – I’m very grateful to anyone who uses these links but their use is entirely optional. The compensation does not impact how and where products appear on this site and does not impact reviews that are published. For more details please see the advertising disclosure found at the bottom of every page.
JAL has posted a very good Business Class fare for travel between New York JFK and Taipei which not only sees customers traveling in great cabins but also opens up the opportunity for members of various oneworld loyalty programs to earn a significant number of redeemable miles and miles/points towards elite status.
Headline Fare Rules
- Travel Monday – Thursday on each transpacific sector
- Travel 1 November – 12 December 2019 or 28 December 2019 – 28 January 2020
- Minimum stay is 12 hours
- Maximum stay is 3 months
- 1 stopover permitted in each direction at $100 each
- Tickets must be issued by 31 October 2019
Fare Availability
I suggest using a combination of ITA Matrix and Google Flights to make sure you see all the options open to you (I’ll post my search parameters later in this article) but, purely for the purposes of seeing dates on which good fares are available, Matrix works best.
Don’t be tempted to just focus on the numbers in orange as although they may be the very cheapest fares on offer, if you look carefully you’ll see that there are plenty of other dates on which very good fares can be found.
Watch Out For Long Layovers
Unless you’re looking to make a stopover in Tokyo you should be careful to avoid accidentally booking an itinerary that looks like this:
Booking an itinerary like this may be a good way of getting a free night in Tokyo without having to pay the $100/layover fee but it’s not going to be much fun if all you want to do is get to Taipei as quickly as possible.
Search Parameters
These are the ITA Matrix search parameters that I used…but be aware that the “maxdur” commands that you see have been inserted to avoid long layovers in Tokyo.
If you don’t mind a long layover in Tokyo or simply want to see what availability looks like regardless of journey times you should remove these commands before searching.
Earning Miles
I’m going to guess that the overwhelming majority of readers who would consider booking this fare will be looking to credit the flights to the American Airlines AAdvantage program.
The total distance of this particular trip is 16,150 miles (per great Circle Mapper)…
…so this is what AAdvantage members can expect to earn (excluding elite status bonuses):
- Base AAdvantage Miles – 16,150 miles
- Cabin Bonus AAdvantage Miles – 4,038 miles
- Elite Qualifying Miles – 32,300 miles
- Elite Qualifying Dollars – $4,038
- Elite Qualifying Segments – 4
Bottom Line
Whether you want to get to Taipei or Tokyo this is a very good fare for travel between the US and Japan/Taipei and the fact that it originates on the East Coast makes the fare all that more impressive.
It’s a little disappointing that the travel dates don’t go past the end of January (this would have been a great fare to use to see Tokyo in cherry blossom season) but if you’re looking to visit Japan or Taiwan between now and then you’re unlikely to find a much better deal.
[…] week I wrote about a good JAL Business Class fare from New York to Tokyo and Taipei and now it looks like the airline has posted another good fare for travel between Boston and Beijing […]