Up until now, you can make an international upgrade award reservation before you issue your ticket. Japan Airlines (JAL) will usually hold it for 5 days and cancel it if the lower class ticket hasn't been issued before the deadline. However, JAL will shorten the hold period to 3 days from September 2 2013.

Special upgrade discount campaign on Europe and North America routes. Image from Japan Airlines

Japan Airlines (JAL) has just announced a rather amazing upgrade campaign for JAL Mileage Bank (JMB) members in the American and Europe/Middle East/Africa regions as part of the Thanks to 25 million JMB members! celebration. For a limited time, you can save up to 20,000 miles when upgrading from Economy to Business class on JAL flights between Japan and North America and Europe! However JAL is only running this campaign for a very limited time! Below are the details

[Update: Added business cabin configuration analysis] Japan Airlines (JAL) has just announced their plan of new full-bed business class seats the new FLY ON (aka elite) benefits for 2012 that they will implement to make up for the discontinuation of the upgrade points (UGPs). Below are the details

For those traveling on Japan Airlines (JAL) flights to Guam (GUM), JAL has announced a new discounted upgrade campaign that might be useful to you. A roundtrip upgrade from economy to business class will now cost 10,000 JMB miles instead of 20,000 JMB miles.

Japan Airlines (JAL) has rolled out yet another upgrade discount campaign on flight to Korean, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Guam. This time lower booking classes are eligible (not just Y and W). You can redeem a roundtrip upgrade award on these routes with just 10,000 JMB miles! Below are the details no this discounted upgrade award campaign.

Japan Airlines (JAL) launched a premium economy upgrade campaign late last year. Originally the campaign only covered US routes. With 10,000 JMB miles, passenger can upgrade from Y to PY (one-way). JAL announced that this campaign will be extended to the European network from Jan 15 2011.

Added routes are :
TYO-CDG（JL041/042/405/406）
NRT-LHR（JL401/402）
NRT-FRA（JL407/408）
NRT-DME（JL441/442）

This campaign ends on March 31 2011. For details, you can refer to JAL website (Japanese, English)

Last year Japan Airlines (JAL) ran a couple of birthday related campaigns for the JAL Mileage Bank (JMB) members residing in Japan. One of them is to give out free domestic upgrade coupons for JMB members to use around their birthdays. JAL announced today that they will continue this campaign through 2011. Registration is required and JMB members whose birthdays are in January can register now. Below is the detail of the upgrade campaign (copied from my last year's post :p).

Enjoy! JAL Premium Economy Campaign. Image by Japan Airlines

Japan Airlines (JAL) has announced a new campaign allowing JAL Mileage Bank (JMB) members of ALL region to redeem an upgrade award to premium economy class on flights to and from the US (SFO, LAX, ORD, JFK) from October 1 2010 till March 31 2011.

FLY JAL! SFO Super Discounted Upgrade Campaign. Picture by Japan Airlines.

Folks at San Francisco are usually the one who got screwed by Japan Airlines (JAL), but not this time (OK if you don't kind the downgrade from 773 to 772 with no F service and JAL Shell Flat seats :P)! In order to celebrate the launch of SFO-Haneda route, JAL is running a special discounted upgrade award campaign for flight JL001 and JL002. You can save up to 20,000 miles on a roundtrip upgrade award!

Japan Airlines (JAL) finally got back to me yesterday regarding whether booking class 'X' qualifies for the 400 Fly On Point (FOP) bonus. It took JAL two weeks to confirm this as they were confused themselves about this change. And as expected, the new business booking class does qualify for this bonus. So below is the JAL Mileage Bank miles and FOP summary effective April 1 2010

Talk about being sneaky! Japan Airlines has updated its previous announcement no booking class/JMB miles accumulation rate changes and the Fly On Point (FOP) bonus campaign page without publishing it on the front page (at least I didn't see it). I only found out about the changes when I looked at the new JAL ex-US fares from April 1 (yes, they are changing the fare rules).

[Update: JAL has announced the discontinuation of upgrade points. All upgrade points will be expired on March 31 2013 and no more upgrade points will be awarded to the JMB elites]

I am trying to document some of the Japan Airlines and JAL Mileage Bank knowledge I gained over the years so more people can benefit from it (and save you some time posting the questions on FlyerTalk :P). In some ways, this is kind of similar to a "sticky thread". Just like the trip reports, you can click on the title bar menu below the banner to search for all JAL 101 posts.

What's a better way to start this than to talk about the upgrade points JAL has just credited to your JMB account. If you have attained JAL Mileage Bank most frequent flyers status for 2010, the upgrade points should have been deposited to your account.

Japan Airlines have been running two discounted upgrade campaigns in parallel for a while. I had a hard time figuring out what the differences are because one of the campaigns is for JAL Mileage Bank members in Japan only and therefore of course was only available in Japanese (Hopefully JAL will update their English site for this campaign too). After exchanging a couple of messages with a JAL traitor (you know who you are LOL), I finally figured out what the other discounted upgrade campaign is about. And guess what, JAL is extending that campaign till March 2011 (this is not a typo!)

JAL brings back Birthday discount and upgrade. Image by Japan Airlines.

The popular birthday sale for domestic tickets is back! Japan Airlines will bring back this once popular birthday promotion from April 1 2010. On top of that, JAL is running a birthday upgrade to domestic Class J promotion for JMB Japan members.

Japan Airlines will make changes to accumulation rate and classes eligible for upgrade awards in the JAL Mileage Bank program. These changes are effective from April 1 2010.

Japan Airlines has announced yet another change/devaluation to its JMB program. From April 1 2010, booking class "L" will NO LONGER BE ELIGIBLE for upgrade awards using JMB miles nor upgrade points. This doesn't affect me much personally since the lowest transpacific fare eligible for upgrade awards is H and K for Japan and Asia flights respectively. For details, you can refer to JAL website. So what's next? Change in elite benefits? Less bonus miles? Any guess?

As expected, Japan Airlines once again extends the popular SUPER discounted upgrade award promotion. The promotion which originally ends on December 31 2009 will be extended to March 31 2010.

I just got off the phone with JMB reservation agent to reserve my upgrade award and it only costs me 10,000 miles for a one-way transpacific upgrade :)

Japan Airlines is extending the Super Discounted Upgrade Promotion till the end of the year (at least for the JMB Japan members).

Japan Airlines Australia is having a Double-Hit Big Campaign to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Australia route right now. Not only you can purchase a roundtrip Economy class ticket between Australia and Japan for only AUD800 (tax excluded), you can also be one of the lucky passengers who get a free upgrade.