UK Trip #2: JAL Miles to London — 148,000 Miles on JAL vs. 55,000 on a Partner Airline

Last time, I wrote that when I started looking into whether miles could get me to the UK more cheaply, I ended up with a very different answer from the one I expected.

This post is that story.

Once I decided to go to the UK, the first thing on my list was the flight. I spent a while checking and comparing all sorts of booking sites.

I usually collect JAL miles with my JAL credit card. Until now, I had used them for family trips to Hokkaido and Okinawa. This time I thought, “OK, the flight is the most expensive part of any overseas trip. Could I cover it with miles? Let’s find out.”

By the way, there’s no special reason I chose JAL over ANA, lol. I think both have their merits. I just remember deciding “I’m going with JAL!” at some point…

By then I already had over 100,000 JAL miles. If you live in Japan and pay everyday bills like your phone and gas with a JAL card, the miles add up surprisingly well. The one catch is that for regular members, miles expire after three years, so you end up using them within that window. With elite status you can keep them for five years, so if you fly a lot, it can really pay off.

To cut to the chase: even with the same JAL miles, the number of miles I needed changed almost threefold depending on which type of award ticket I used ((((；ﾟДﾟ)))))))

A nonstop JAL flight between Japan and London during Obon (Japan’s mid-August holiday season, when everyone travels) would have cost 148,000 miles. The partner airline flight I actually booked: 55,000 miles. Whoa~~~~

In this post, I’ll walk through all of it, numbers included: how I searched for an award ticket to London with JAL miles, where I got stuck, and how I finally made it.

What you’ll learn in this post
・How many miles a JAL award ticket to London costs during Obon
・Why cheap tickets earn zero JAL miles (it’s about booking classes)
・JAL has three types of award tickets, and each is priced completely differently
・How much fuel surcharges (extra fees for the cost of fuel) differ between airlines
・How I actually searched for a partner airline award ticket

First, I checked JAL’s nonstop flight

(This is as of late September 2026.) I started simple and searched for JAL’s nonstop flight: Haneda to London with no connections. The easiest option.

JAL’s website says an award ticket to London costs 27,000 miles one way in economy. That would be 54,000 miles round trip.

“Oh, this might work ♪( ´▽｀)”

So I checked seat availability for my Obon dates, and…

148,000 miles round trip, plus ¥141,530 in taxes and fuel surcharges (　ﾟдﾟ)

Where did the 27,000 miles go…? Well, of course. Peak season is going to be expensive.

On top of that, shifting the outbound flight by just one day changed the miles a lot. I won’t go into how I picked my dates, but the days that are easiest to leave on tend to cost more. Simply put, the days lots of people want to depart are the expensive ones. Here are the outbound flights (one way) for the same week:

(Checked on JAL’s website in late September 2026, for a week just before Obon)

The base is 27,000 miles one way, but on some days it was over 90,000. More than three times as much ((((；ﾟДﾟ)))))))

Why does it go up so much?

When I looked into it, JAL’s own international award tickets use a system called “Award Ticket PLUS.” Once the seats at the base mileage are gone, extra miles get added depending on how many seats are left.

In popular periods like Obon, it’s already like this a year in advance.

Oh, I know this from domestic flights, I thought. When I booked a trip to Okinawa with miles, the price kept climbing depending on the timing. The earlier you book, the better. While you hesitate, seats keep filling up, and since award seats are limited, the fewer there are, the more miles they cost. Once you decide to go, just book it.

Out of curiosity, I also searched the same dates on Google Flights. That shows tickets you buy with cash, nothing to do with JAL miles. Booking about a year ahead, a JAL nonstop round trip between Haneda and London was ¥250,330.

With miles, I would pay ¥141,530 in taxes and fuel surcharges, plus the miles. That saves about ¥110,000. But once you count the miles themselves, it doesn’t feel like that great a deal.

In other words, using 148,000 miles on a JAL flight during Obon works out to only about ¥0.7 per mile…

Before even getting that far, I didn’t have enough miles, so that’s where I gave up on JAL’s nonstop flight. It’s the fastest way to get there, so it was tempting. But I want to use my miles wisely (；´Д｀A

Searching for connecting flights on Google Flights

OK then, connecting flights. I went through flight comparison sites one after another: Skyticket (a Japanese booking site), Trip.com, Google Flights, and more.

The easiest to use was Google Flights. I could enter Nagoya, Tokyo, and Osaka as departure points all at once and compare everything together. On Skyticket and Trip.com, I could only enter one departure city at a time, so switching back and forth was a hassle.

One thing I noticed: each comparison site recommended different flights. No two sites gave me the same results.

So unless you first decide how you want to travel, where you’d like to connect, and how many hours on a plane you can handle, you’ll be searching forever. I think it’s best to skim several sites first, then decide which route and airline to go with.

The cheapest flights started at about ¥180,000–190,000, but some took 30 to 40 hours. Others made me think, “Why is this so expensive?” I was looking with around ¥300,000 as my upper limit.

The two that were cheap and tended to show up near the top were:

• Cathay Pacific (connecting in Hong Kong)
• China Eastern (connecting in Shanghai)

That’s when it hit me.

“Cathay is in oneworld (an airline alliance), just like JAL. So if I fly with them, wouldn’t I earn JAL miles?”

Cheap tickets earned zero JAL miles

So I looked it up: how many JAL miles you earn when you fly Cathay Pacific (from JAL’s website).

“Booking classes” are the letters airlines use to split even the same economy cabin into different price levels.

And the cheapest tickets on comparison sites are usually in a class that isn’t on this list.

“Wait, some classes earn zero? (　ﾟдﾟ)”

If you buy a cheap ticket thinking, “It’s oneworld, so I’ll earn miles,” you won’t earn a single mile. If I’m buying a ticket anyway, I’d rather earn miles with it.

Oh, and about China Eastern: at the time, I thought it had nothing to do with JAL miles and was considering paying cash. But when I checked again, it turns out China Eastern is a JAL partner airline, so it seems you can earn miles with it and use it for award tickets too.

However, JAL’s website has a notice that it “temporarily suspended new bookings on the JAL website from June 20, 2024,” and that was still the case as of September 2026. It seems you can still book by phone. I had a vague memory of seeing something like “China Eastern can’t be booked right now,” and this must have been it.

The other heavy cost: fuel surcharges

Award tickets aren’t just miles. You also pay fuel surcharges (extra fees for the cost of fuel). And they were completely different from airline to airline.

*All amounts are for tickets issued between September 1 and October 31, 2026. Fuel surcharges are reviewed every two months, so check again when you book.

Fly JAL on JAL miles, and you pay ¥100,000 round trip on top of your miles. With Qatar Airways, zero.

I had heard that fuel surcharges had gone up a lot, but when you travel somewhere far away, it’s a cost you can’t really avoid. And a pretty big one…

JAL has three types of award tickets

This is where I learned for the first time that there are three types of award tickets you can get with JAL miles. And the way the required miles are set is completely different for each.

That 148,000-mile Obon ticket was the one on the left, the “JAL International Award.”

The “JMB Partner Airline Award” in the middle, on the other hand, is priced by total flight distance and doesn’t change by season. Obon or not, a year ahead or not, the same distance costs the same miles.

For example, a round trip covering 12,001–14,000 miles of distance costs 55,000 miles in economy, and 14,001–20,000 miles costs 70,000 miles (from JAL’s official chart).

“Wait, it doesn’t go up even during Obon?”

This really surprised me. I had assumed international flights went up by season too, just like domestic ones (　ﾟдﾟ)

Qatar Airways had zero fuel surcharges, but no Obon seats

So a partner airline award on Qatar Airways, with zero fuel surcharges, would be unbeatable!

With that in mind, I searched from JAL’s award ticket page, and…

Fully booked.

No flights on that route.

Fully booked.

Over and over (ノД`)

From what I read online, Qatar Airways is very popular for award tickets because there are no fuel surcharges. To get to London you connect in Doha, but flying on miles alone is really attractive. Still, for the Obon period, I couldn’t find any seats through JAL’s award search, even a year ahead.

What I learned here: partner airlines release very few seats for miles.

The miles don’t change by season. But once the seats are gone, that’s it.

So with partner airline award tickets, if one shows up and fits your budget, book it right then and there. Strike while the iron is hot.

How I actually searched

In the end, this is how I searched:

1. Use a comparison site (like Google Flights) to pick a tentative route: “Let’s try going via here.”
2. Check whether that airline is a JAL partner.
3. On JAL’s award ticket page, enter the exact same route as a “multi-city” search and search the whole trip.
4. If it shows up and fits your budget, book it right away.

The thing is, results almost never come up. Shift the departure or return by a day and it’s fully booked, or it says there’s no route on that date.

I did wonder whether booking one way at a time might be easier. But if I couldn’t get one of the middle segments… that would be scary in its own way. So in the end, I entered the whole itinerary and took whatever seats came up.

Changing my departure airport saved about 20,000 miles

One more discovery.

I live in the Tokai region (around Nagoya), so at first I searched from Nagoya (Chubu Centrair). That gave me routes like flying from Centrair to Haneda in the morning, waiting at Haneda all day, then catching a night flight to Europe.

That came to about 77,000 miles.

“Isn’t the Nagoya–Haneda leg adding miles?”

So I changed the departure to Haneda and searched the same way, and…

About 55,000 miles.

About 20,000 miles less (　ﾟдﾟ)

Then it makes more sense to take the shinkansen (bullet train) to Tokyo and save the miles. Small changes can make a big difference, so it seems worth trying several patterns with different departure airports and routes.

In the end, I got Finnair

Searching around the dates I wanted, what finally came up was Finnair (Finland’s airline, a oneworld member). From Haneda, connecting in Helsinki, to London.

55,000 miles plus ¥153,180 in taxes and fuel surcharges.

Compared with the cash price of Cathay Pacific for the same period (¥243,040 round trip on Google Flights), I saved about ¥90,000. That’s about ¥1.6 per mile.

More than double the ¥0.7 of the Obon JAL flight.

Maybe this is good enough? Shift it by a day and it says fully booked, and this is the only flight that comes up. If I can get to London on JAL miles with a partner award for 55,000 miles and about ¥150,000, and even do a short stopover in Finland to go into the city for dinner… isn’t that actually great? I started to think…

The chaos of actually booking Finnair (seeing “1 seat left,” the seat selection story, and so on) is coming in the next post.

Summary

• An Obon JAL award ticket to London cost 148,000 miles plus about ¥140,000 round trip. On some days it was more than three times the base of 27,000 miles (one way)
• Flying Cathay or other oneworld airlines on a cheap ticket (a class not on the list) earns zero JAL miles
• JAL has three types of award tickets. Partner airline awards are set by distance and don’t change by season
• Fuel surcharges: about ¥100,000 round trip on JAL, ¥0 on Qatar Airways with a JAL award
• Partner airlines release very few award seats. If one shows up, book it on the spot
• Just changing your departure airport can change the miles by about 20,000

To my fellow JAL mile collectors: if you’re heading to Europe, before you give up after searching only JAL flights and thinking “not enough miles…,” try looking for partner airline award tickets too.

And that’s how Suitman finally got a ticket to the UK ♪( ´θ｀)ノ

English expressions from this post (B2–C1)

Suitman is working toward Eiken Grade 1 (the top level of Japan’s best-known English test), so here are a few useful phrases from this post, picked out by AI.

① go through the roof (= to rise very quickly, especially prices or numbers)

During the Obon holidays, the number of miles needed went through the roof.

Picture something rising so high it bursts through the roof. The base was 27,000 miles, but during Obon it hit 91,000 on some days. It really did go through the roof.

② get more bang for your buck (= to get more value for your money)

Using partner awards, I got much more bang for my buck from my miles.

Originally casual American English; “buck” means a dollar. Whether a mile is worth ¥0.7 or ¥1.6 is exactly what this post is about.

③ miss the boat (= to miss a chance)

Award seats are limited, so if you wait too long, you’ll miss the boat.

Literally missing the boat, so it means missing an opportunity. Award seats are few, so don’t miss the boat while you hesitate.

Dictionaries I used to check the meanings:

• go through the roof｜Cambridge Dictionary
• more bang for your buck｜Cambridge Dictionary
• miss the boat｜Cambridge Dictionary

References (Japanese pages)

• JAL Mileage Bank: Cathay Pacific (mileage accrual rates)
• JAL International Award Tickets: required miles
• JMB Partner Airline Award Tickets: mileage chart
• JAL international fuel surcharges
• Cathay Pacific: fuel surcharge updates