JL flight changes with opening up of slots at HND

[Matt_01]

This is just my initial observation and throwing up some commentary/ thoughts regarding some recent changes to JL. Most on this site would be aware that HND has opened up a number of slots in 2020 and this seems to have had a knock on effect to JL flights to/ from the US. I received a notification from QF overnight that a couple of my flights and MrsM and MissM flights have changed. In summary the changes were airport changes with a number of flight now departing or arriving into HND rather than NRT. As a couple of examples flights back from JFK (JL3) are now arriving at HND, at approximately 4am, I have requested JL move us to JL5 and have had to request seats to be released on QF26 so we do not need to travel to NRT. Another change were flights NRT-ORD which have been changed to HND-ORD, for this one we were connecting from JL774 and there is insufficient to get from NRT-HND. As most of our booking were F or J rewards the availability has all but dried up. I am sure that this will sort itself out in the future. After a very quick search of the JL site it would appear that the moving of flights to HND has just made it a little more complicated when travelling to US via Japan.

 

[tdimdad]

The notifications of changes started to come through, gradually one by one. The 'Trips' in the QF app is a bit of a mess after this but my flights are several months away so the QF IT interns have still ample time to make something out of it. JAL also neatly transferred the seat allocations through to the new flights which is a nice little detail.

 

[tdimdad]

Now, reviewing my changes at JAL's MMB, they had lost the special meal requests when transferring the bookings to new flights. Easy to miss in the review if you only skim through the flight times, etc, but equally easy to add them back.

 

[Matt_01]

As a quick update on our travels. JL changed our F rewards from JL3 to JL5 so now getting in at a better time. QF released a couple of J rewards on QF 26 but needed SST intervention to make this happen. Also as this is a OW mileage booking no additional points were required as I had already reached the cap. Our Flights MEL-NRT-ORD were changed to CX ADL-HKG-YYZ which actually works out better.