ANA Launches New Award Calendar, but Several Issues Limit Its Utility

Using your points and miles to fly with All Nippon Airways (ANA) has several quirks. The same can be said when trying to book award travel using the airline’s Mileage Club program.

To make things slightly better, ANA now has an award calendar feature.

The ability to view a calendar of available seats on ANA flights across multiple routes and dates at once sounds great, but it still leaves several items unresolved.

While this is a step in the right direction, a closer look shows it’s just that — a step.

New ANA Mileage Club Award Calendar

ANA has launched a new award calendar feature, as first noticed by Thrifty Traveler, which is available here. This page allows you to sort by region and preferred cabin, such as economy or business, for award redemptions using your Mileage Club miles.

After choosing a region and travel class, you can view results in a chart for 2 months at a time. Scrolling to the side reveals more dates. Symbols indicate open seats either to or from Tokyo, and you’ll see all airports served by ANA in the region you selected.

For example, choosing North America will show flights between both Haneda and Narita airports to Los Angeles (LAX), San Francisco (SFO), Seattle (SEA), and more as you scroll down.

This is advantageous over simply searching for awards in a few ways, though it’s not perfect. For example, you can easily scroll through 2 months’ worth of dates, and you can compare multiple routes at once without needing to choose dates.

Compare that to searching for an award using the booking page, where you’ll see a week’s worth of dates on your outbound and return dates. However, this is misleading.

While that page says there are seats available every day of the week, there aren’t. The next page says all flights have a waiting list for award seats, and most of us aren’t interested in those results. ANA’s award search includes waitlisted and available seats together, which isn’t helpful.

Thus, the new ANA calendar can help you find seats that are actually available to book on ANA flights using ANA Mileage Club miles. But it will only help you find awards that meet both of those criteria.

For example, finding flights on ANA’s calendar — and then confirming they’re available with an award search — only found business-class awards in ANA’s The Room seats that you can book with ANA directly. The award calendar won’t help you find seats to book with a partner, such as United MileagePlus miles.

Additionally, the calendar won’t show results for partner flights booked using ANA Mileage Club miles. It only displays availability for ANA’s own flights.

Another drawback of the calendar is that it doesn’t show real-time availability. According to the airline, it’s “based on the availability [from] last night,” meaning the awards were available hours prior, but they might not be available at the time of your search.

Final Thoughts

All Nippon Airways (ANA) has a new award calendar that shows you a range of dates for booking award seats. While it’s nice to get an overview of multiple routes and multiple dates, the calendar’s utility is limited. It won’t show you connecting flights, doesn’t guarantee the seats are still available, and doesn’t help you find award flights on partner airlines — or even ANA seats you can book with partner airlines.

So, how useful is this calendar? It can help you start a search, but you’ll still have to find the awards yourself after you see some “maybe” options from ANA’s award calendar.