British Airways publishes peak and off-peak dates a year ahead, so most people assume that is how loyalty programmes work. It is not. It is how one programme works, and the three biggest Oneworld carriers outside the Avios calendar each landed somewhere different.

The underlying problem is identical for all of them: a seat in cherry blossom season is worth more than the same seat in February, and a programme that ignores that gives its best inventory away at the worst moment. What differs is the mechanism, and the mechanism decides how much control you have.

Japan Airlines — a real calendar, three seasons deep

JAL is the closest of the three to what BA does, and the only one where you can look up a date and know the price before you search. International award tickets are priced across three seasons — Low, Regular and High — and the season is set by your departure date, not when you book.

The spread is not marginal. On the routes where JAL publishes First Class awards, the same seat runs roughly 110,000 miles in Low Season against 140,000 in High Season. That is a 30,000-mile swing for choosing a different week.

The Low Season windows are the ones worth planning around, because they are narrow and they repeat:

JAL publishes these two years ahead on a Japanese fiscal year running 1 April to 31 March. The season is set by your boarding date. Every date from 1 April 2026 to 31 March 2028 resolves to exactly one season — we checked all 731 days for gaps and overlaps and found none. Verified 2026-08-01.

Read the shape rather than the table and three things fall out. Regular is most of the year at 55%, so the default is neither cheap nor expensive. Low is only about a fifth of the calendar and it clusters in two places — mid-January to the end of February, and the first three weeks of April. And the one that catches people out: cherry blossom season in early April is LOW season, while Golden Week immediately after it jumps straight to High. The single best-value week to fly JAL to Japan sits directly beside one of the most expensive.

Work the exact numbers for your route in our JAL FOP and miles calculator.

Cathay Pacific — tiers, not dates

Cathay took a different route. Asia Miles does not publish a seasonal calendar at all. Instead it runs several award charts at once — a Standard chart at the lowest rate, then higher-priced tiers when Standard space has gone.

The practical difference matters. Under JAL, a date is expensive whether or not the flight is full. Under Cathay, the same date can be cheap in March and expensive in April purely because someone else booked the Standard seats first. You cannot plan around a calendar, because there isn't one — you plan around booking early.

That makes Cathay the most rewarding of the three for anyone who books the moment the schedule opens, and the most punishing for anyone who decides in the last two months. Our Cathay Status Points calculator covers the earning side.

Qatar Airways — no calendar, no tiers, just the market

Qatar went furthest. Privilege Club moved Avios redemptions to fully dynamic pricing in 2024 and stopped publishing a fixed calendar entirely. The Avios cost floats with whichever cash fare bucket Qatar has released for that flight.

This is the model people find hardest, because there is nothing to look up. A Tuesday in November can cost more than a Saturday in December if the cash fare happens to be high that day. The only way to know is to price the specific flight.

It also means the usual advice inverts. With JAL you shift your dates; with Cathay you book earlier; with Qatar you watch the cash fare, because when that drops, the Avios price drops with it. Price your route in the Qatar Avios and Qpoints calculator.

Which model suits how you actually travel

None of this replaces the Avios peak and off-peak calendar for British Airways, Iberia and Aer Lingus, which genuinely is a published list of dates. Those three are in our peak and off-peak calendar, alongside a straight answer on which programmes have no calendar at all.