ANA Mileage Club is one of my favorite ways to use American Express Membership Rewards, but it is also one of the most complex mileage programs.
This article will cover all the important things you need to know when redeeming ANA miles, including a trick on how to book ANA award flights before most other people.
Roundtrip Flight Requirement
ANA does not allow one-way flights with its miles on both ANA and partner airlines. You must book a round-trip or round-the-world award.
If you want to book a one-way flight on ANA, you must use miles from another partner, such as United MileagePlus, Avianca LifeMiles, Air Canada Aeroplan, or Virgin Atlantic Flying Club.
Changes and Cancellation Fees
ANA allows you to make changes to awards for free as long as it is the same (1) person, (2) airline you are flying, (3) route, and (4) service class.
For example, if you were flying non-stop from Chicago to Tokyo round-trip on ANA, you could adjust your flight dates for free. But if you originally booked a connecting flight from Chicago to Tokyo and wanted to switch to a direct flight, you would have to cancel and rebook.
The cost to cancel an award is 3,000 miles. You can cancel within 24 hours of your initial award booking for free if you made it via ANA’s US website or on the phone, but the 24-hour rule doesn’t apply to bookings via ANA’s Japanese website.
This is an important rule to know since the Japanese website for first access to the award calendar before the US website. I once made a mistake with the names on an award booking via ANA’s Japanese website and it cost me 6,000 miles even though I called within an hour of the booking.
Waitlisting Flights
ANA allows you to waitlist for a flight as long as you have enough miles in your account. This is a really powerful tool that many people overlook because it allows you to put a free award hold on an available flight when combined with a waitlist flight.
The value of this will make more sense when I detail the reverse booking method below, but waitlisting flights allowed me to put free award holds on 10+ flights so I could secure my perfect family trip.
Award Calendar Opening
The best way to book ANA business and first-class flights is when their calendar opens 355 days in advance at 9 AM Japanese time (8 PM EST / 7 PM CST the previous day).
However, to book when the calendar opens, you will need (1) a VPN connected to Japan or South Korea, and (2) an internet browser with its cookies and cache cleared. I used the DuckDuckGo Browser for ANA bookings since you can easily clear data without affecting my main browser Google Chrome.
If you don’t use a VPN and a clean browser, you must wait until midnight local time to book. I have found that flights are usually booked up within 2-3 minutes of the calendar opening in Japan, so you are at a major disadvantage if you don’t use a VPN, and you don’t use my reverse booking method detailed below.
ANA previously consistently released two business class seats for all its North American routes (New York, Chicago, Washington DC, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle). However, I tracked the openings for several routes when the calendar opened over a two-month period and found that it is much harder to book.
Chicago, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., are usually your best bets for consistent award space. Los Angeles is the hardest to book. I’ve searched right at the calendar’s opening, and there are rarely any openings despite three daily flights. The other routes are hit or miss. I’ve opened the award calendar at opening many times, and the flights are already waitlisted, which means that ANA never released any initial award seats.
A few other things I learned when booking ANA at the start of the calendar:
- You need to be super fast. I have had many situations where flights were available, and I tried to book the flight within 2 minutes of the calendar opening, but someone else beat me.
- Pre-register the information of anyone who is traveling with you, which you can do by visiting this page and then clicking “Award User Registration.”
- I found that changing a flight is much quicker than booking a new one, so I would waitlist the route I wanted to take and then change the date when the calendar opened. This saves about 30 seconds, which seems unimportant, but it could be the difference between someone else snagging the seat before you.
- I also found that preloading the calendar to the day before you want to go and clicking the next day right when it hits 8 PM EST saves you about 10 seconds.
- Monitor your reservation over the next day or so. I’ve had situations where I booked a confirmed seat but was then somehow moved to the waitlist.
Pro Tip: Reverse Booking Method
Booking ANA at the start of the award calendar can be difficult, and award space can disappear in a few minutes. I discovered a trick that I haven’t seen anyone discuss that I call the reverse booking method.
The normal trick that many experienced award travelers use for ANA is to initially book a two-day award trip from the US to Asia and then change the end date for free to your real date when it becomes available in a week or two.
The issue with that trick is that people traveling from Japan to the US can book the US to Asia flight ahead of US travelers by at least a day since they don’t need to book a return flight to the US.
To avoid this issue, I actually book my trip in reverse to take advantage of a free award hold on the flight I want. To take advantage of this method, you must have enough miles in your ANA account to cover the flights and book right when the award calendar opens.
Here’s my method for flights from the US:
- Find a flight from Tokyo to the US that is currently waitlisted and when the calendar opens up, book Tokyo to the US (waitlisted) and the US to Tokyo (available seat). This will give you a free award hold on that US to Tokyo seat and allow you to book a day ahead of those other US travelers who don’t read this article.
- Wait a day or two and cancel the first flight, which does not have a fee since it’s not a confirmed flight. The award seat usually goes back into inventory instantly. Then, instantly rebook the correct route from the US to Tokyo for a 2-3 day trip with the first US to Tokyo flight confirmed and the return flight waitlisted. I also suggest having a few other backup flights as well since there’s no limit to the number of partially waitlisted flights.
- Lastly, change your return date to the correct date once the award calendar opens for that date.
If you are planning a stopover in Japan, it can get quite tricky since multi-city bookings require you to call to change a flight. However, you could use the reverse booking method to hold the flight you want, cancel the partially waitlisted awards for free, and then rebook your multi-city itinerary as the calendar fully opens.
Transferring Points
One of the major disadvantages of ANA’s mileage program is the time it takes to transfer points from American Express and Marriott Bonvoy, which is 3 to 4 days.
Most other programs allow instant transfers, so if you see award space you can quickly book it with another program’s miles. However, with ANA, you must fully commit to using their miles since you will usually need the miles in your account ahead of time to book a flight.
Fuel Surcharges
ANA passes on an airline’s fuel surcharges, which are also called carrier-imposed surcharges. This fee is generally tied to the cost of aviation fuel. When fuel prices are high, fuel surcharges go up, but some airlines keep them high to earn revenue on award tickets.
For example, on a round-trip business class flight on ANA from Chicago to Tokyo, I had to pay about $440 in fuel surcharges and about $60 in taxes and other fees. You can find ANA’s fuel surcharges here.
Stay away from Lufthansa, Austrian, and SWISS with ANA miles because those have $1,300+ per person in fuel surcharges for business class and $300+ for economy class. Turkish Airlines and Thai Airways also have fairly high fuel surcharges, but not as bad.
Canceled Flights or Routes
Another disadvantage of booking an award with ANA miles is when there is a canceled flight or route. ANA offers no flexibility when there is a cancellation, and you have to hope you can find award availability to rebook yourself.
This happened to me, and it was very devasting. It is very difficult to book an ANA flight from the US to Australia with a stopover in Japan, but I worked really hard to secure a great trip for myself and my family members from Chicago to Tokyo (stopover) to Sydney and then back from Perth to Tokyo to Chicago.
About a month before our trip, ANA canceled the Perth to Tokyo route. Given this cancellation, I unsuccessfully requested several times that ANA rebook us on the Sydney to Tokyo route, but ANA refused. Their view was that we either had to cancel or wait for award space to open up, which is very rare on that route. We ended up canceling and instead went to Europe with Avianca LifeMiles.
Mileage Expiration Policy
ANA has a hard mileage expiration policy of 36 months with no way to extend the life of your miles. You either need to use your miles or lose them.
I am not a fan of this policy because there could be situations like mine where ANA cancels a route and you are forced to use the miles within a year or two to avoid them expiring.
