Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
My premium subscribers learned about this deal and got the dates to fairly wide open award availability earlier this week. If you’re interested in the dates and don’t want to miss the next hard-to-book points & miles deal I send, you can sign up today.
To start, if you’re new to award travel, one of the more confusing topics is booking award flights through partners. What do you mean you can use JAL miles to book Air France?? They aren’t even in the same alliance.
Most major airlines are in an alliance, where airlines in the same alliance have reciprocal benefits, help with being able to book connecting flights across different countries, and potentially allow rewards to be redeemed for flights within the same alliance. There are 3 big airline alliances globally (oneworld, SkyTeam, and Star Alliance). An example is Delta. They are in SkyTeam along with other major airlines including Air France/KLM, China Airlines, Korean Air, SAS, Vietnam Airlines, and many more.
But Japan Airlines is not part of SkyTeam, they are part of another alliance called oneworld. However, you can actually use Japan Airlines miles to book Air France award flights. Sometimes, airlines have one-off partnerships. If you’re an airline history nerd, it looks like JAL and Air France started code sharing back in 1960, and have continued that relationship to help facilitate connecting flights between Tokyo and the rest of Europe (serviced by Air France). JAL PR on some of the old history.
How to book Air France through JAL?
There are three things you need to be able to pull this off. But I think the effort is worth it because you can book a one-way business class flight from North America to Paris for as low as 42k points and ~$6. But you have to book through JAL, which has some unique challenges.
- You need to have miles in JAL. Or at least have miles that transfer to JAL. That includes Bilt (transfers at 1:1 rate), Rove Miles (transfers at 1:1 rate), or Capital One points (transfers at 4:3 rate but often has 30% transfer bonus, making it 1,000:975 rate).
- If you haven’t already opened a JAL Mileage Bank loyalty account, you will have to wait at least 7 days before you can search and book award flights. It is a 7 day waiting period if you transfer points into your newly opened account, otherwise it is a 60 day waiting period. You can sign up here on JAL’s site if you haven’t already.
- Currently, you have to call JAL to book these Air France flights. Although you can search on JAL’s site (as long as your account has been open long enough) and find availability, you will get an error as you progress through the booking. Calling JAL to book is the workaround.
To call JAL, find their contact information directly on JAL’s site here. You shouldn’t generally trust random numbers posted on the internet, or using Google’s AI summary (which can pull from fake sites). There are many bad actors out there who set up fake sites with fake numbers to try to get you to call them to try to take your money by pretending to be an airline. Or if you do trust me, you can call call 1-800-525-3663 from within the US. Then press 5 for award reservations.
Want to get more points to transfer to JAL, or short a few miles, my Rove affiliate link can give you a boost. Get 1,500 miles when signing up, better than the public offer. You do need 2,000 miles to transfer out, but you can now buy gift cards that instantly post, along with numerous other benefits. This includes earning up to 30-60x points back per dollar on booking hotels, 5x points on hotel bookings that count as direct bookings, shopping online across 13,000+ online merchants to earn miles, or from dining at select restaurants. For more details about Rove, check out my blog post here.
The detailed steps to book
1. Search and book for dates on JAL’s site. You need an account that is opened at least 7 days and have transferred points into it to search. Otherwise, you have to wait 60 days.
2. Once logged in, find the section where you can “Search for award tickets”
3. And then find where you can choose “JMB Partner Airline Award Tickets”
4. Then, you fill in your search information. Choose “One-way”, make sure to choose “Air France” as a partner airline, and put in your dates and destinations, and “business class”. Then hit search.
5. Then see if the availability appears. You will have to call JAL to book this.
To call JAL, find their contact info directly on JAL’s site here or if you trust me, call 1-800-525-3663 from within the US. Press 5 for award reservations afterwards.
6. If you try to book online, you will get an error after you put in your personal information.
Why book through JAL?
For whatever reason, JAL and Etihad have more “saver” award availability to book Air France awards than booking directly through Air France themselves. Like, a lot more. At the time of sharing this in early September 2026, there is wide open award availability across the major North American gateways that Air France serves between January 2027 through late June 2027.
JAL’s pricing is also really really good due to having a distance-based award chart for partners. Flights that are 2,001 miles to 4,000 miles in business class price at 42k points. A round-trip booking can be even better as JAL’s pricing is based on trip distance, and a round-trip is considered a trip.
So how many miles do you need if you book one-way from the major North American routes? Here’s a breakdown across major North American cities to/from Paris. I break out the one-way and round-trip distances and how it corresponds to JAL’s business class award chart. For many East Coast cities, it is 42k points one-way and 80k round-trip. It might not make sense to book a round-trip to save 4k miles as you lose flexibility of booking awards.
It could make more sense when it costs 60k points one-way from the Midwest and West Coast and 85k points round-trip instead (35k points savings).
How to find dates with availability?
Because these saver awards on JAL are not bookable on Air France/KLM, you can’t just use the Air France/KLM calendar trick to find dates. Instead, you can search manually 1 day at a time on JAL’s site, use Etihad’s weekly calendar view (find dates with 80k business class awards) as a proxy, or use a site like seats.aero (affiliate link) that aggregates Etihad award availability. I found that around 70% of dates shown on Etihad’s site are bookable through JAL, so it’s a decent proxy to avoid having to search one day at a time on JAL. Apparently there could be 1,500+ dates available to book.
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