Enjoy! JAL Premium Economy Campaign

Enjoy! JAL Premium Economy Campaign. Image by Japan Airlines

Japan Airlines (JAL) has announced a new campaign allowing JAL Mileage Bank (JMB) members of ALL region to redeem an upgrade award to premium economy class on flights to and from the US (SFO, LAX, ORD, JFK) from October 1 2010 till March 31 2011.

One-way upgrade costs 10,000 JMB miles. Tickets have to be issued in Y,B,H or K classes. Why someone who has a Y fare ticket want to pay 10,000 JMB miles to upgrade to PY is beyond me (as they qualify for the PY seats if it is available and can pre-select them already, maybe JAL will change this?)

I don't quite like the sound of this. Hopefully this is not an indication of JAL considering to follow/test BA's approach on upgrade. Currently JAL allows upgrade from Y to C and there were no upgrade award from Y to PY. However on BA, the only way to upgrade to C is to buy a PY ticket. A Y ticket will be upgradable to PY :( Let's hope this campaign is a complete failure and JAL won't even think about adopting BA's way of issuing upgrades :p Seriously, the cheapest PY ticket booked in E class is only a few hundreds more than the Y ticket booked in K class, the lowest upgradable ticket. If you have enough miles, I would highly recommend you to issue the upgrade to C and skip PY. It totally worth the extra 15,000 JMB miles (or 5,000 JMB miles on SFO). Seriously no one flying on JL001/002 with extra 5,000 JMB to spare should upgrade to PY!

For more details on this campaign, you can refer to JAL website.