My first amazing Alaska Airlines redemption

A few days ago, I had over 125,000 Alaska miles. This was a lot of miles that I had essentially no use for. I don’t want to redeem these miles on domestic routes because they almost always are a worse deal than simply paying cash. In addition, I want to requalify for status, so I need to pay a cash fare to make that happen (as award tickets don’t earn elite qualifying miles, nor regular miles for that matter).

Recently, I found myself needing to book a flight from Tokyo to Shanghai on JAL. The cash options were about $381 round trip for a “super saver” Z fare on JAL from Haneda to Pudong. The flight to Hongqiao was even more expensive, more than $500 for a round trip.

Why is Hongqiao more expensive? Simple: supply and demand. Hongqiao is the older airport that’s closer to the city center. Its proximity makes it more desirable to fly into and out of, causing its demand to be higher. It has a very limited number of international flights, further constraining supply. Meanwhile, Pudong is the main international airport of Shanghai, but it’s very far away from the city center and is a pain to get to/from. The Shanghai airport authorities have done a good job renovating Hongqiao to be a comfortable facility for international flights, so it’s actually not bad flying into/from Hongqiao thanks to its prime location and its status as an intermodal transit hub. (Hongqiao is also Shanghai’s primary high speed rail station.)

Back to booking my tickets. I wanted to save money so I chose to fly to Pudong. When I chose the $381 fare and was at the part of the booking process where I could choose my seats, to my surprise, I found that I couldn’t. This fare does not include the ability to select a seat! That was a huge turn off. I absolutely don’t want to be stuck in a middle seat on this flight.

The only economy fare that would allow me to pick a seat was more expensive than a business class seat, so I started looking at the cash fares for business class. I found that it would cost $900 round trip for a flight between Haneda and Pudong. I thought to myself, that’s absolutely ridiculous. I’m not paying nearly $1,000 just so I can pick a seat on a plane.

Alaska miles to the rescue

The only way to avoid such pain is to use miles. The only meaningful mile stash I have on a oneworld alliance airline is Alaska. So I went to Alaska’s website and did a search. To my surprise…

Availability was wide open for Haneda to Pudong!

Just one issue though.

Pudong is harder to get to. You don’t want to fly to Pudong unless you have to (i.e. with long-haul international flights).

So I checked what the situation was at Hongqiao.

To my astonishment, it was the same low price.

It makes sense: this is an uncommon redemption that nobody is fighting for. Furthermore, Alaska still uses an award chart for determining such redemptions. That’s why an economy class fare that would cost $381 costs just 15,000 miles round trip (plus the ability to select seats!). It’s also why a business fare that would cost over $1,000 in cash only costs 30,000 miles round trip.

If I was very starved on miles, I could easily afford 7,500 miles + $38 and allow myself to choose a seat in economy. But for only 15,000 each way, I could sit in business class for 2 hours.

For the convenience of flying to Hongqiao and the luxury of flying in business class, that’s a no brainer.

So, did I book it?