Finding business class award bookings to Japan from the US in the summer can be challenging, as it is a very popular tourist destination. I could not find any reasonable flights from Northern California, but I was able to find availability from LAX on one of my favorite flight types: the fifth freedom flight. A fifth freedom flight is a flight by an airline between 2 countries, but neither of those countries are the airline’s home country. Singapore Airlines (SIN) operates a flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo to Singapore (LAX-NRT-SIN) on the Boeing 777-300ER, which allows the opportunity to fly from LAX-NRT as a fifth freedom flight. We will take another fifth freedom flight on Singapore Air in Sept 2024 from New York to Frankfurt (JFK-FRT), and SIN even has a third fifth freedom flight from the US from Houston to Manchester (IAH-MAN), although this will be ending on April 1, 2025 due to insufficient demand. Fifth freedom flights are a unique way to travel the world on many of your favorite airlines, without having to connect through that airline’s home country.
The award redemption for the LAX-NRT segment on SIN in business class cost us 123,000 miles each, and we transferred points from our Chase Sapphire Reserve card for this. 123,000 miles for an 11 hour flight is a bit higher than I would prefer, but we simply could not find a better deal to Japan at that time of year. For us it was worth it to spend the extra points to get the product we wanted, even if it wasn't the best deal. I’ve talked about SIN business class in the past, so I won’t rehash the flight experience here.
For the return flight we were leaving from Osaka back to California. I again had difficulty finding an award booking for this flight, so we ended up paying cash for a flight in business class from Osaka to Seoul to San Francisco (KIX-ICN-SFO) on Asiana Airlines. It was approximately $1200 per person for the flight, and we used the AMEX Platinum Card for 5X points on the purchase. Overall it was a fine flight, but not really memorable in terms of the business class product.
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