Thanks for reading first of all! I just wondered if anyone knew much about JAL Mileage Bank and, in particular, booking award seats (availability permitting) for other people with your miles? Just to add: I am not a member of JAL's "Family Club" and, for the moment, would prefer not to be. Basically, I will soon be looking to (hopefully!): • Redeem an award seat on a JAL flight for my girlfriend's mother, but using my JAL miles. • It will involve transferring my SPG starpoints to my JAL account (yet to be initiated for perhaps obvious reasons) • From a dummy run, I can see that I can make this one-way redemption online via my JAL accouunt (though, without the necessary miles in my JAL account at this stage for the redemption, I am unable to get as far as entering the passenger's name) • From FT, I have been unable to get a definitive answer to this question -- i.e. using one's own JAL miles to book an award seat for somebody else -- although most seem to think that there won't be an issues and that Korean is the only airline which precludes you from booking award seats for other people. I just wondered if any UK InsideFlyers might know the answer to this? Thank you!
Hi Scoob, I'm afraid I've never actually redeemed with JAL (or know anything about their loyalty programme tbh!). For what it's worth (not much), I've never heard of any issues, but I haven't heard much about JAL Mileage Bank full stop. How many Starpoints would you be transferring over? (If it's only a few thousand I'd just risk it, but if it's tens of thousands I'd try and get confirmation from JAL directly. Is the Mileage Bank award chart any good?
Thanks for your reply, Joe. Yep, quite a few starpoints -- 40,000 for a 50,000 redemption on JAL 1st class, Oceania to Japan. And, as I say, it's not for me but the gf's mother. I've sort of tentatively heard all should be well, but I just worry about some technicality scuppering the deal at the eleventh hour. What me, neurotic? Award chart -- good question. Pretty good for partners (Emirates, LHR - JFK - LHR at 100K, as you doubtless know) and the redemption I want above is 50,000 JAL miles against 75,000 AA miles, 95,000 Qantas points and BA's 100,000 Avios. I used to live in Japan, hence the interest -- I recently flew Kyoto to Shanghai in JAL business for something in the order of 18,000 Avios and £25.00, which wasn't at all bad given the quality of JAL's business class product.
Interesting, I might have to spend a bit of time swatting up on JAL. I know telephone agents can be a bit clueless (generally speaking) so the advice might be wrong, but is it worth giving JAL MB a ring to double check ( I wouldn't be keen on potentially wasting 40,000 Starpoints either!)? I've no idea if they speak English or if you speak Japanese but I'd give it a go personally. If you already have any Miles at all there, you could also try entering the name etc and going as far as you can before confirming for whatever their cheapest award is. Or if not, just risk 20k starpoints first to do a trial run on a cheaper award before transferring the next 20k, so at least you only lose 20k rather than the full lot.
Great advice, Joe - I'll try giving the telephone agents a call, but my own experiences with agents echo your own: I often end up having to school them on the ins and outs of their own programme... which is a tad disconcerting as by no means do I know it all (actually quite far from it). I have also tried the dummy run booking, but, without sufficient miles in your account for the redemption you want, you can't get as far as passenger name selection with JAL MB bookings, alas. I'll feed back in due course as to how it all pans out!
Yes, I seem to spend a significant proportion of my life explaining to agents how their programmes work (they're usually very nice and quite appreciative, but I'm not entirely sure if it's supposed to be that way round! - certainly doesn't engender a great deal of confidence...). Interested to hear what you discover - good luck!
