avios points - I am new to it

mitre

I wouldn't give up, availability does change quite often.
The 350 days thing (it's actually midnight GMT, 355 days before) is because BA guarantees availability of 2 biz class seats on each flight and that's what people are trying to snap up for popular routes/times of year.

Another alternative is to book an open jaw, say fly to Tokyo, back from Shanghai.  China visa is free if you stay <72 hours.

phatbear

Japan, especially Tokyo is heaving in April therefore the ability to get tickets for anything but cash is unlikely. Im not sure if you know but April is the expected month for the cherry blossom season each year therefore everything get booked up very extremely early.

The same will be the case from late sept to early nov as its the rugby world cup in Japan


I disagree with this statement consider this year me and the better half used 67500 miles and £400 each to fly upper class to San Francisco with Virgin the cash price for these tickets was just over £8000 each, and this is still the price for a one way ticket to SFO from LHR in upper.

WeegyAVLover

@phatbear - cherry blossom season is the main reason for going to Japan in April.

AMc

FWIW we went to Japan for Sakura this year - not specifically for it but we wanted to go to Japan and it's supposed to be very, very hot and humid in the summer.
We caught the blossom in Osaka on March 31st and the full blossom in Kyoto in the first few days of April.  Hiroshima had finished and by the time we got to Tokyo on 7th April there was nothing to see.
The season was early this year and it happens at various places at slightly different times based on weather and climate.  If you booked for mid April this year in Tokyo you wouldn't have seen anything at all.

My pictures are in this album
Japan 2018

We bought flights from KLM at the end of December 2017 so paid a hefty premium.  We could have saved several hundred pounds if we'd booked ahead in July when we first thought about it!
Still worth every penny!

WeegyAVLover

@AMc - Your Pics look amazing, you obviously know how to take a photo... I am useless at taking pictures.

We have just booked business flights with Lufthansa so going out at end of March for 3 weeks.

@AMc - how did you find the weather that time of year?  I am wondering what to wear, as the temps seem like the 13-17 C during the day then drop to about 10 C at night.

Hard to know what what to take....

AMc

Thanks for the kind words.

We were very lucky with the weather. Mostly bright sunny days - t shirt weather. Took a hoodie and a pack down jacket but didn’t use them much.  We had one massive downpour and bought brollies (they love a brollie) but it dried out before we arrived at our destination.

Japan is extraordinary but there are lots of things you’d be wise to learn before you go. How to use a bathroom and how to work the toilets for instance - no, I’m not kidding!
I got tonnes of help and advice from the relevant thread here Japan Travel Thread

chudas

A bit late to this thread and a little off track but a quick tip to accumulate points quick. Get the gold card, spend £2k in the first 3 months, refer your partner to open a gold card, cancel your gold card. You can repeat this every 6 months to take advantage of the bonus promotion.

The BA card is a great card to get once you have accumulated the points you need as they do the companion card which is effectively 241 flights. (You will still need to pay the tax for both passengers but it's still a great saving).

I've learnt all of this plus more from a website called headforpoints.