It’s 2023, a year that turned out to be one of my busiest flying years, I’d been travelling a lot around Europe and the Middle East that year, but August was going to see my return to Asia and some of my favourite cities to visit in the world. This will be my first time heading to Asia since covid, so I was pretty excited to be going to a number of cities.
The first trip required me to spend a week in Seoul and a week in Tokyo. It made sense both economically and with less time zone changes for me to do this in one back-to-back trip.
I was, as usual, given the budget of a premium economy trip to work with and I set about looking for options to either plus my flights or make them unusual or special. I essentially had to find 3 routes, London to Seoul, Seoul to Tokyo, then back home to London again.
My first tip for this kind of trip is to never book the middle leg with your main long-haul flights. For some reason they always seem to be very expensive and for the middle leg you often don’t need any premium cabin as it’s normally the shortest part. So, I always book the middle leg separately.
This left the main outbound and return legs, which I thought would make sense on an open jaw ticket, probably with BA, see my article on open jaw tickets here. However, this was not to be the case, as with other trips I’d planned this year, BA seemed to be the most expensive, so I started shopping around. The next logical option was Cathay Pacific, probably flying out to Hong Kong, then on to Seoul, Tokyo, back to Hong Kong and home again. But that was pricey. How about JAL, possibly flying to Tokyo on a return ticket, then adding the trip to Seoul in, again not very affordable. I simply could not find a flight combination that worked with a return booking, open jaw or not. In the end I started searching one-way tickets and this is when I found a good option.
For the outbound I found flying with Cathay Pacific, in premium economy, via Hong Kong was going to be my best option and on budget. Cathay is a One World airline, so all my frequent flyer benefits would apply, and I’d be collecting points. Coming home it was almost JAL in premium economy, as they fly direct, but for only a few hundred pounds more I could fly business with Qatar. Yes, this would mean a stopover in Doha for a few hours, but given the length of time it takes to fly from Tokyo to London with everyone avoiding Russian airspace, a break would be a welcome thing. Plus, it was business class all the way, so lie flat beds and much better service, not to mention the extra tier points!
I was still keen to try JAL as when I’ve flown them in the past, I’ve found their service to be impeccable. Luckily there is an option to JAL from Seoul to Tokyo, going from Seoul’s smaller regional airport; Gimpo International. The economy flight was within budget, but again I decided to treat myself, and as it wasn’t too expensive to upgrade to business, I did. This would be a particularly interesting flight as it was on a 787 with one of JAL’s business class suites. A great opportunity to compare it with the all the other suites I’ve tried on BA, Finnair and Qatar.
All flights booked and ready to go, here are links to the trip reports:
For my flight on Cathay Pacific out to Seoul click here.
