When to buy ANA airline ticket to Japan
 

I was advised on this board that I should be able to get a RT ticket from Dulles to Narita on ANA in April for less than the $1225 that it has been priced at for months. I was told I should be able to get those tickets for about $900. Does anyone have experience with timing regarding when the price goes down on ANA tickets? I have to fly ANA on a certain flight, as I have gotten my daughter a frequent flyer ticket, so am not interested in info on less expensive flights on other airlines.
Perhaps I should post this on the Airlines forum, but I thought I'd try here first since it was on this board that I was told I should be able to get the seat for less. Thanks in advance.

Since you are not flexible, you might want to buy soon, regardless of price. With taxes and fuel surcharges and security surcharges galore I don't really think fares will be so low this year.

Check consolidators, check directly...I'd buy between now and January. We've just bought tickets for 2/28 KIX - JFK - Tampa - KIX for 58,000 yen each...but with taxes and charges, two tickets ended up costing 167,000 yen in the end...taxes and charges are 50% of the ticket cost these days!

What dates of travel? I see fares for April are $1171 to $1271 (on itasoftware and travelocity) on ANA 1+2, so you haven't lost by waiting. I took those flights in May a couple of years ago, bought the ticket in February.

Dates are: Departing Dulles April 7; departing Narita April 23

I checked the UA code share price for those flights. It's $1600.

mrw: re UA code share price- what meaning does that have? The ANA price is $1271.50 (w/taxes) as of right now.

United sells seats on the same flight but coded as a United flight. What it means is that United right now thinks that they can sell seats for $1600.00. This is likely to be pricing in line with the other US carriers that provide service to Japan on the same route/similar route.

Depending on the fare class of your ticket, if the price goes down you may be able to reticket at the lower fare for a small charge, or no charge. As a rule, the lower the fare, the less flexible the fares rules are. I don't know ANA's fare classes, but I do know NWA's very well and use this information when I book...to balance the amount of money that I pay with a bit of flexibility should I need to change/cancel. If you go over to flyertalk.com there is a board just for ANA frequent flyers which should be able to provide you all the information you would ever need about ANA and more. The people over at flyertalk are serious travellers and it's a fantastic resource.

Oh, ok. But I don't quite get how United thinks they could sell a comparable seat for 1600 when ANA is selling it for 1271 and the ANA route is direct from Dulles to Narita, whereas United's has one stop. Maybe I should just go ahead and buy the ANA seat soon. The flight is still empty. There's not a chance it will go up in price on ANA soon is there? I wouldn't think it would go up in price until much closer to the flight. But I am new to pricing and paying for these Japan flights, as we flew on two FF tickets last year.

If the United is a codeshare flight with ANA, that means that the aircraft is the same, the flight is the same...just a different set of letters in front of the flight number. Airlines do this all the time...Thai Air's flights to Thailand out of Japan are often codeshares with JAL...sometimes the aircraft is Thai's, sometimes it's JAL's. In this case, United is selling seats on ANA's aircraft (I think, I didn't actually check whose aircraft it is, could be United's and ANA is selling by codeshare)...anyway, it's a way for airlines to partner up and have more routes that they would otherwise be unable to maintain.

Pricing is always changing. Pricing is based on a very complicated formula that is closely guarded by the individual airlines...basically based on historical passenger loads, number of seats sold at the moment (really, the moment), market conditions, and any other number of factors that we, the public, are not aware of. The number of seats available from any particular fare bucket is also constantly changing.

For example, I'm now following the loads on our NRT - BKK flights...hoping for a bump or an op up to business class (on our free tix as this route has been historically oversold and lucky passengers often can get bumped, which we try to do to if our schedule is flexible. Over the past 2 weeks, the flight has shown no tickets for sale, 9 full fare business seats for sale, 1 discount business seat, no full fare economy seats for sale, but 7 deeply discounted seats available...changing all the time.

Moral of the story, there is no way to know how much your ticket will cost 5 minutes from now. In all likelihood, the time it takes you to complete the trasnaction on line won't be enough to have the fare change on you, but it has happened, especially when there are special deep discounts. You find the fare, and when you click to pay, the fare mysteriously is much higher than the previous page....no mystery, someone beat you to it and the allocation for that fare is gone...for the moment. Might come back, might not. Might go up, might go down.

What you should do is decide how much you are willing to pay...how much is reasonable. And buy it. If the fare goes down a lot, if you've got a fare without strict change/cancel penalties, you'll be able to reticket. You should certainly be clear on the fare rules before you buy so if this does happen, you won't be shocked to learn that you wouldn't be able to change your ticket to a lower fare without paying a huge change fee which would negate the savings...know what I mean?

I was buying a ticket at united.com from IAD to Munich a few years ago when I saw a United flight at a good price. Just below it was a Lufthansa flight for $100 less. Then I noticed it had exactly the same dep/arr times as the United flight. It was LH xyz operated by United. Same plane, lower price. So I took a shot with your itin.

The fare is $962.80 at fly-ana.com right now for the IAD-NRT-IAD nonstops for your dates.

Thanks for bringing this back up. I guess this shows that the advice of waiting a little to get the ~$900 fare is correct.

emd, when are you going to be in tokyo?

THANKS mrwunrfl! I checked two days ago and it was still $1225. I will buy my ticket today!

Kuranosuke: Tokyo proper (Westin Ebisu) is April 8 (arrive that evening) - April 13th, go to hotel at Disney Sea (which is still in
the Tokyo area) on April 13 til April 15. On 15th we head to Hakone for a night, then on to Kyoto, etc.

Will you be in Tokyo then?

it sounds like you're getting your ticket today, but just in case there's still time...

is there an IACE in DC? i'd think there would have to be...i can't tell you what the acronym stands for, but its basically a travel arranger for trips to japan - my wife's company uses them frequently since they're a small outpost of a japanese company and are constantly flying people from atlanta to japan and vice versa...

their prices are usually quite cheaper than anything else we can find - we called them up last week and were able to secure roundtrip tickets from atlanta to narita for $617 apiece, leaving 3/22 and returning 4/2 - i know that's just ahead of the madness that april can be, but they were actually willing to quote us that same price had we wanted to arrive in april too...

granted this one won't be nonstop, as we're changing in detroit (its on northwest, no wonder), but we felt we couldn't pass it up at that price...just thought i'd throw this out if you're curious...

here's IACE's website:
http://www.iace-usa.com/

I second the tip to contact IACE... www.iace-usa.com

They may not have posted fares for April yet but a call to any of their offices should help. They normally post lower fares than anyone else on trips to Japan.

sam

Thanks for the good tip for another time. But I need to be on this particular flight as I already have my daughter on same flight with a frequent flyer ticket. Need this nonstop flight for her sake; she goes back to school (7th grade) the day after we get back. No flexibility on this one. For me, $963 to get both of us there and back nonstop on these dates (centered around her spring break and when her quarter ends, etc.) is a really good deal.

mrwunrfl, are you sure you put in departing on April 7 and returning on April 23? I just did that again and am still getting $1272.80.

i didn't mean to imply that IACE doesn't handle nonstop flights, or that they only offer northwest - they quoted nonstop ATL-NRT for us also (delta), but we decided we'd rather save the cash by taking the one-stop - i would usually think i'm crazy for doing that since i always prefer nonstop, but it'll be our 6-month-old's first flight, so if it gets off to a bad start we can at least try to calm her down in detroit before moving ahead...

out of curiosity, i checked IACE's site (we dealt with them over the phone, but they do have a website) and the only airline they list april prices for at the moment is JAL, telling you to call for the rest...and i don't know if its their normal procedures or not, but they held our request for 48 hours before we came back to them to confirm we wanted the seats...

i'm not a shill for IACE (in fact this is the first time i've used them), but i was pretty impressed with them...

ANA was having a Winter Sale and it ended February 2! I saw that the sale fare was the same price $823+140 as the ticket I priced for your dates. Sorry I didn't mention it yesterday but the little price tag icon that identifies the Super Saver fares was NOT shown for your ticket so I thought it might not be part of the sale. I double-checked that and crossed my fingers.

I definitely had your dates correct last night. I also tried April 6-24 since those dates are Thursday and Monday, respectively, and I thought we might find an even better fare using one or both of those dates but the price was $$$ higher.

United does have award availability on your dates. The bookable online option is IAD-JFK-IADC. I just called MP and they said it would cost $100 to change the ANA award but, he said no United seats were available on April 7. At united.com it shows 2 award seats available outbound and one on the return. The ANA flight would be the way to go but flying United on your purchased ticket would have a couple of benefits, including the possibility (slim, maybe, but some possibility) of an operational upgrade.