Our series Award Success will continue today with a quite valuable award I was able to book using Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles on Japan Airlines and it even allowed a stopover.
Booking stopovers into award reservations is a very convenient feature that by now has almost disappeared from most award programs as they noticed it’s cheaper for them to eliminate stopovers.
I’m heading back to Asia in a couple weeks with my BA Longhaul ticket ending in Seoul and I was looking to extend the trip a little. For that purpose I discovered that Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan allowed me to book an award on Japan Airlines online without having to call in. But not only that: A 5 day stopover in Tokyo was also possible without extra surcharge!
You can actually search with one connection including varying dates and a gap, creating a stopover:
I searched for another day as I didn’t want to arrive that late into Tokyo and decided for two morning departures:
The taxes and fees ended up to be very reasonable even though Alaska Mileage Plan has this weird $12.50 fee for partner airlines that is being charged per direction.
This is excellent redemption value considering it usually requires two awards for this type of connection. As an example, with British Airways Executive Club (which charges per segment) it would cost 52,500 Miles and substantially more taxes to ticket this reservation. American AAdvantage about the same as BA except that the taxes would be more in line with what Alaska charges, essentially the real airport tax but nothing in addition to that.
Conclusion
I’m really glad I moved some SPG Points over to Alaska Mileage Plan last week and that I was able to use them for this redemption. It saved me a bunch of British Airways miles which I’d have used alternatively before discovering this option.
Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan has been a very popular program for many years now though there has been controversy of them tweaking the award chart without much notice (if any) for certain partners. I therefore didn’t move a large amount of points over, just enough to issue two of these awards.
