Japan Airlines may finally be partnering with some accessible partners in the US! This well-regarded Japanese airline has been somewhat elusive in terms of award flight booking, given that so far you could only book award flights with its OneWorld partners, and in the US that’s Alaska and American airlines. While redemption opportunities with these airlines are competitively priced, they can be hard to come by because both Alaska and American are transfer partners with few or no major credit card rewards programs. However, this may finally be changing!

1. JetBlue TrueBlue adds Japan Airlines as a redemption partner
2. Bilt may have leaked the addition of Japan Airlines as a transfer partner
3. Summary

JetBlue TrueBlue adds Japan Airlines as a redemption partner

AwardWallet reported this morning the addition of Japan Airlines as a reward redemption partner in jetBlue’s TrueBlue frequent flyer program. JetBlue has been on a roll lately, adding different airlines as partners to make its program more interesting and get more engagement and loyalty from the traveling public. Last year, TAP, Qatar Airways and Icelandair were added, among others, and now it seems Japan Airlines was added as well.

It’s safe to say that this is an exciting development, first and foremost because, unlike Alaska MileagePlan and American AAvantange, it is easy to accrue TrueBlue miles through various credit card rewards programs. Transferring to JetBlue TrueBlue are American Express, Chase, Bilt, Capital One and Wells Fargo, so you have a lot of choice in what points you can use.

But what about redemption opportunities? Are they any good? Fortunately, Seats.Aero (my favorite award ticket search engine) allows for direct searches of JetBlue TrueBlue, so you don’t need to go doing painful one-by-one searches in JetBlue’s own booking system. Instead, if I do a blanket search from North America to Asia, I can see a large amount of flights available, but a few things stand out:

• The cheapest business class fare is at 59.000 points one way plus up to $100 in taxes, depending on the origin, from various West Coast airports to Tokyo. For example, Seattle or San Diego to Tokyo-Narita. This is not a bad redemption at all!
• Generally at a higher price point I’m seeing flight from Honolulu or West Coast airports to Tokyo-Haneda.
• I don’t really see any flights from the US East Coast to Japan, however. The only origin that shows up is Boston, but there’s no business class availability.

So, while the prices seem rather competitive, you may have to jump through some hoops in order to actually get on one of these flights. Right now, it seems like those of you living on the west coast are in luck, with flights originating from Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco and San Diego, or Honolulu. Let me also add that currently JAL’s new A350, with its lovely new business class seat, doesn’t operate into any of these destinations, so you’d be on the older product (above image). I reviewed both and lied them both, mind you, though the newer seat is certainly superior.

Regardless, it’s worthwhile keeping this in mind because currently this would certainly be the easiest way to get access to reasonably-priced award tickets on Japan Airlines.

Bilt may have leaked the addition of Japan Airlines as a transfer partner

Over the weekend a weird page popped up: it suddenly seemed like Japan Airlines was being added as a transfer partner to Bilt. My husband caught a post about it on Instagram (I forgot who posted it, apologies), sent it to me, and I spent the next hour trying to see if this was real. However, I didn’t se any mention of it in the Bilt app, or on the Bilt website. The only hint at it was a specific website that, unfortunately, has since seemed to also have disappeared.

So, I didn’t think much of it, until tonight, when I saw Awardwallet had just posted about it as well. So, I guess I wasn’t entirely crazy, and perhaps there’s somethign real going on here? I’ll let you know if anything changes. Suffice it to say that this would be increrdibly exciting, as it would be the first time that Japan Airlines becomes a transfer partner with any US credit card, allowing for much easier accrual of Japan Airlines Mileage Bank miles, and direct access to redemptions through Japan Airlines.

Summary

So there you have it. Japan Airlines was added to JetBlue TrueBlue, and there’s some hint that Bilt may also add them as a transfer partner. Both of these are exciting developments, though we’ll mark the latter as ‘developing’. The former is exciting for the major reason that JetBlue trueBlue is transfer partners with a several major credit card rewards programs, majorly Chase, Capital One and American express, allowing for an easy way to acquire the points to grab these Japan Airlines flight awards. While the current redemption rates are very favorable, the availability is not so great, with a heavy focus on flights originating on the west coast.