Introduction
Having booked most of my honeymoon so far, I haven’t had anything to post about it in a while. In a previous honeymoon post, I shared how I booked Japan Airlines business class tickets from JFK to Tokyo using Alaska Airline miles. Since first class is only 10,000 miles more per person, I was really hoping to upgrade our seats. I’ve checked Alaska Airline’s website almost daily since January and you wouldn’t believe how shocked I was to find two first class seats available last week!
Making the Change
The minute I saw these seats, I called Alaska Airlines. I didn’t want to get my hopes up since Japan Airlines seats displayed on Alaska’s site are sometimes not actually available.
Alaska Airlines currently has the best policy when it comes to making changes to your flight. Before this call, I’d already made three changes to my itinerary without any fees. Lucky for me, I was able to make this change before the update to their policy on June 5th. It’s possible they would have waived the fee since I was upgrading my seats, but under this new policy, this change would have cost $125 per ticket!
The call took less than 10 minutes. After forking over 20,000 more miles, we had secured our first class seats! The only change is that we will now be departing a bit earlier in the morning and flying to Narita instead of Haneda.
Final Thoughts
I originally paid 120,000 miles and $36.20 for two business class seats from JFK to Haneda. With the switch, the cost was 140,000 miles and $36.20 for two first class seats from JFK to Narita. I was excited that no additional money was required. According to Google Flights, these seats are worth $27,417.20!
We also had previously taken advantage of Alaska Airline’s stopover rule to fly from Japan to Singapore. For 130,000 miles and $59.70, we are getting $34,321.36 worth of business and first class flights from JFK to Tokyo to Singapore. This is definitely my most valuable redemption to date!
Honeymoon Stats
Points spent: 1,169,000
Out-of-pocket cost: $1,612.76
Total value: $66,246.69
