Hello!
We're a group of 5 people that are going to Japan later this year, most likely in November for 20-21 days, more or less (including flight times), and I was wondering if we could have some help.
We don't have a specific schedule yet. We only know that it needs to be between November and December (for example, we have looked from the 10th of Nov to the 1st of Dec), but as long as it's something like 21 days, we're flexible about dates and we're flexible with routes as long as we avoid places like DOH and DXB. We're not interested in which dates it could be cheaper or anything like that because we understand that's impossible to predict, but places or routes that tend to be cheaper would be extremely useful.
We live in Mallorca (PMI) and we have been twice to Japan before (the first time we went with Emirates for about 950€ and the second one with Qatar for about 830€), and we had 0 troubles, but with the recent events, we'd like to avoid these places as much as possible, and the current options we have, had the prices increase by a lot except for some companies like China Eastern that we have been told to avoid even before the recent ticket-canceling events.
Before continuing, this was our flight schedule the first two times (both times with return):
- PMI to BCN (with AirEuropa) and BCN to DXB and HND (with Emirates), tickets from PMI-BCN and BCN-DXB-HND were purchased separately.
- PMI to MAD (with Vueling) and MAD to DOH to HND (with Qatar), tickets from PMI-MAD and BCN-DOH-HND were purchased separately.
Our first intention was to go from PMI to MAD and then from MAD directly to HND with a direct flight with Iberia, but prices have increased drastically to a point that, even if we can afford them, we're not sure it's the best option (they went from about tracked 800€ to 1300€ in the best-case scenario).
Since this happened, we started looking for alternatives. We will always depart from PMI because we live here, so we need to go somewhere else and get the flight to HND/NRT there, so we started looking at both MAD and BCN departures to HND/NRT, avoiding Emirates, Qatar, and these kind of companies for safety reasons, but the routes we found were expensive too (not as expensive as the Iberia ones, but expensive, nonetheless), except for some China Eastern and China Southern flights, which were something from 700€ to 800€ in the best-case scenario, but we have been told (even before the recent ticket-canceling events that occurred a while ago) that we should avoid China Eastern as much as possible but got no information about China Southern.
We want to know any tips or things you may have to share with us about the following topics, please:
- We want to avoid all these places like DOH and DXB (not necessarily Emirates and Qatar Airlines, only the routes, which, sadly, they do).
- Are China Eastern and/or China Southern as bad as we have been told, and should we avoid them too?
- Since we are in PMI and we need to fly somewhere else to get a flight to HND/NRT, would there be a good place to go and get the tickets from there because they tend to be cheaper? For example, something like PMI to BER and then another ticket for BER to HND/NRT (so two separated tickets).
Kind regards and thank you very much.