2026 Japan Winter Flight Sales: Dates, Waves and Card Math

NT$1,799 (about US$55) one way to Okayama, before tax. Tigerair opened that fare in mid-July for its tenth anniversary and left the window up for 31 hours. Winter flights to Japan keep that rhythm all season long. The cheap seat does not appear on the day you decide to book, it appears for thirty-odd hours, and the only variable is whether you happen to be watching when it does. What follows puts five carriers on one timeline, works out how to wait for the next wave if you already missed one, and runs the numbers on which card to reach for.

First, the winter schedule: the season turns on October 25 and seats drop in batches

The winter window is the same worldwide, October 25, 2026 through late March 2027. Full-service carriers such as China Airlines and EVA keep booking open all year with fares that drift daily, so there is no sale date to catch. Low-cost carriers do the opposite and release the new season in batches, usually split across several rounds, which is why "when do winter tickets go on sale" is a question that only has an answer for LCCs. Two kinds of dates are worth tracking, in my experience: the day the season opens, and the promo waves that follow it. The schedule window has a second effect that catches people out. If your trip runs into February or March next year, the return leg does not exist to be bought until the winter batch loads, so buying the outbound now and the return later is standard practice rather than a planning error. The table below is arranged around exactly that.

Where the five carriers stand as of late July

Airline	Taiwan-linked routes	Winter sale progress	Price anchor you can actually see
Peach	Taoyuan to Kansai, Narita, Haneda, Chubu and Naha; Kaohsiung to Kansai	Round 1 on 5/27, round 2 on 6/25 (10 more international routes, Kansai to Kaohsiung among them)	Kansai to Kaohsiung from ¥16,480
Tigerair Taiwan	The whole Japan, Korea and Vietnam network	Wave 1 on 4/15 to 4/17, wave 2 promo on 6/10 to 6/11	Wave 2 one-way fares from NT$1,199
Japan Transocean Air (JTA)	Taipei to Naha, one flight daily	Winter flights opened 7/16, bookable through 2027/3/27	Launch promo reached ¥25,000 round trip
Jetstar Japan	Narita to Taipei and others, priced from the Japan side	Already open; ran a Super Star Sale on 7/17 to 7/21	Asia routes from ¥9,990 one way
China Airlines	Taipei to Takamatsu (sole operator, daily), Kaohsiung and Taichung to Okinawa	Full-service, booking open year round	No promo waves; the lever is how far ahead you book

Every line in that table comes from the carriers' own announcements and press releases, all linked at the bottom of this piece. EVA, Starlux and Scoot had no confirmed winter wave information I could find this round, so I left them out instead of guessing. With no promo to chase, the sensible place to start a price check is the Trip.com flight deals hub, where JAL, China Airlines, Starlux and EVA all sit on one page. Fix a normal price in your head first, because a sale price tells you nothing until you know what it is a discount from.

Missed the May and June waves? Here is the shape of the cycle

Tigerair makes the best teaching example because its cadence is the most regular. Mid-April was the seasonal opening, June 10 and 11 brought the second promo with one-way fares from NT$1,199, and mid-July added another round at NT$1,799 under the Okayama anniversary banner. Looking ahead, Tigerair has historically saved its anniversary blowout for September, and after that comes Double 11 in November. Peach numbers its rounds instead, round one on May 27 and round two on June 25, with more usually to follow. Missing a wave is therefore survivable. The next two windows worth an alarm are the September anniversary sale and Double 11.

One thing to watch out for. A promo wave covers selected routes on selected travel dates and is never a network-wide price cut, so if a fare fits your dates, take it instead of holding out for something lower. I have paid the hesitation tax on this myself. Jetstar showed Narita to Taipei at ¥9,380 on June 25, I went off to compare a few more options, and the sale had closed by the time I came back. The equivalent Asia-route promo in mid-July started at ¥9,990. That ¥610 gap works out to about NT$120 (US$4) at a rough 0.2 rate, which is nothing, but the same hesitation applied to New Year travel dates does not cost you a hundred dollars.

If no promo is coming and your dates will not move, bundling is the other road. KKday returns 1,000 points on flight or flight-plus-hotel bookings over NT$10,000, worth roughly NT$150 against a later order, so call it a 1.5% rebate. Thin, but the bundled price itself sometimes beats buying the pieces apart.

The news angle this month: Okinawa supply just went up

On July 16 Japan Transocean Air, the JAL group's Okinawa subsidiary, opened winter bookings on its Taipei to Naha route. NU302 departs Taipei at 10:15 and lands in Naha at 12:50, once a day on 737-800s, sellable all the way through March 27, 2027. This carrier only flew its first international service on February 3 this year, and launched it with a ¥25,000 round-trip promo. In the same week China Airlines started Taichung to Okinawa on July 21 and added an afternoon rotation from August 13. Stack that on the Kaohsiung to Okinawa service that came back at six flights a week in late May, and China Airlines alone now flies to Okinawa from three cities, around 30 times a week.

More supply is usually good news for fares. For anyone who wants to skip crowded Tokyo and Osaka and keep the flight time short, I recommend putting an Okinawa winter trip on the shortlist this year. You cannot get in the water in winter, but the aquarium and the culture parks are exactly the kind of indoor attraction that runs at low-season prices. Once you land, price the bundles before anything else: look at something like the Okinawa Fun Pass at 39% off first and decide afterwards whether to buy tickets one at a time, not the other way round.

Second-tier cities are the real sweet spot: run the Okayama numbers

Go back to that NT$1,799 Okayama fare and there is a lesson worth copying down. The hardest discounting rarely lands on Tokyo or Osaka. It lands on the second-tier airports a carrier is still trying to grow. Tokyo routes fill on their own, so a token promo does the job; Okayama needs load factor, so the price gets cut properly and extras get attached to it. This time the extra was worth real money. According to the Commercial Times, passengers arriving at Okayama on IT214 between September 1 and November 30 can show a passport and ride the limousine bus to Kurashiki Station free, a service that normally runs around ¥1,400 one way, so a return trip saves you roughly another NT$500 (US$15) in ground transport.

The same logic reads in reverse on China Airlines' Takamatsu monopoly. A sole-operator route has no price war, so the fare stays firm, but you get a stable schedule and almost no risk of the route being dropped, which suits travelers who hate variables. Turn it around and the on-the-ground costs at a second-tier city sit well below Tokyo. Day trips to the Kurashiki Bikan district or across to Naoshima get cheaper again with KKday's Thursday 6% off on Japan products under code JPDAY, good through the end of September. Cheap flight plus cheap ground spending is the real arithmetic of a second-tier city, and the total usually lands lower than people expect.

Jetstar Japan: the shortest section here, because it suits exactly one kind of traveler

Its promos price from the Japan side, so the outbound leg is no use to you. The people it fits are the ones who split the two legs and buy them separately: fly out on another carrier, then sit on Jetstar's Japan-departure waves for the way home. July's Super Star Sale at ¥9,990 for Asia routes is precisely that play, and late June produced Narita to Taipei at ¥9,380. If you already split tickets, you know what to do with this. If you do not, skip ahead, because there is genuinely nothing more to it.

Which card to use: sort by billing currency first, then run two separate lines

E.SUN Bank, one of Taiwan's larger card issuers, is running a travel spending campaign from July through September that needs registration and opens in batches from July 24. The merchant list is unusually complete: Tigerair, Klook, KKday, Trip.com and Agoda all count, and cumulative spending of NT$30,000, NT$50,000 and NT$90,000 pays back 500, 1,000 and 2,000 e-points, with a further NT$2,000 voucher at NT$200,000. There is one fatal hole in it. The terms exclude foreign-currency settlement, and Peach, Jetstar and JTA all bill in yen on their own sites, so charging those to that card earns you nothing at all.

So the math splits into two lines. Everything billed in Taiwan dollars, meaning Tigerair's own site and the OTAs, goes on the single card you are pushing toward a spending tier. Everything billed in yen, meaning the Peach, Jetstar and JTA sites, moves to a foreign-spend rewards card instead. Cathay CUBE's travel plan pays 3% in points at the moment, and E.SUN's Unicard goes up to 4.5% at selected merchants with a 5,000-point monthly cap. Treat both rates as a snapshot and confirm them on the issuer's current page, because banks rewrite terms faster than airlines rewrite sales. If your wallet is not a Taiwanese one, the transferable part is the structure: work out which leg of the booking settles in foreign currency, then work out which of your cards actually pays a bonus rate on that leg.

The OTA line takes one more layer on top. E.SUN cardholders booking flights on Trip.com can use ESUN26F for NT$200 off over NT$10,000, rising to NT$300 over NT$13,000 and NT$400 over NT$16,000, and LINE Bank Visa holders have LBJPKRTHBS8 for 8% off flight-plus-hotel bookings to Japan, Korea and Thailand, capped at NT$1,400, which expires at the end of September.

Here is the worked example. Two people going to Okinawa this winter put NT$16,000 of flights on Trip.com with the E.SUN card. ESUN26F takes NT$400 off at checkout, and the same NT$16,000 counts toward the spending tier. Put NT$34,000 of accommodation on that same card and the total hits NT$50,000, which pays out 1,000 e-points. Identical spending, different order of operations, and the gap between the two versions is about a thousand-dollar note. The point was never to apply for a new card. It is to send the cards already in your wallet out in the right batting order.

My three-step routine for catching a fare

Step one, fix the dates now. The least painful method I have tried is to price the full-service carriers first as a baseline, then bookmark the Trip.com promo code list and run through it once more before you pay, in case something stacks.

Step two, from August onward keep an eye on two things: Peach's next numbered round, and the trailer for Tigerair's September anniversary sale. These sales like to open during office hours. Peach's first round went live at 3:00 pm Taiwan time and the Tigerair Okayama wave started at 5:00 pm, so set the alarm for the right time zone and, just as importantly, settle in advance which person in the group is doing the clicking.

Step three, buy the moment a fare matches your dates, and choose the card by billing currency: Taiwan dollars toward the spending tier, yen on the foreign-spend card. Catching a cheap fare has never been about waiting out the absolute floor. It is about not letting the hesitation tax compound on you.

FAQ

If I buy winter tickets now, will they get cheaper later?

That depends on the dates. New Year and public holidays are hard-demand dates where winter fares generally only climb, and promo waves rarely cover them anyway. Flexible weekday departures are worth a gamble on the September anniversary sale and Double 11. The test is the baseline price from earlier: until you know what normal looks like, you cannot judge whether the number in front of you deserves your money.

What should I watch for with LCC promo fares?

Promo fares are quoted bare, with no tax and no checked bag. Add tax, baggage and seat selection to that NT$1,799 Okayama fare and the gap against a full-service ticket narrows a long way, so compare on the all-in total instead of the headline. Change fees on promo tickets also run high, so if your dates are still soft, leave them alone.

Full-service or low-cost for a winter trip?

Heavy luggage or nervous about schedule changes, take the full-service carrier: China Airlines flying Okinawa 30 times a week leaves you far more room to rebook. Traveling light with flexible dates, camp on the LCC waves instead. Buying the outbound from one and the return from the other is very often the cheapest combination on the table.

Further reading

• The two layers of spending abroad: a full comparison of foreign-spend rewards cards, running on the same billing-currency logic as this piece
• Busan Fireworks Festival booking timeline: a closer event with a tighter booking calendar, and the same question of when to stop waiting

Sources

• JTA press release: Taipei to Naha winter flights on sale from 7/16
• JAL group press release: JTA's first international route
• Aviation Wire: NU301 and NU302 winter timings
• Peach Aviation press release: winter schedule round 2
• CNA: Tigerair winter schedule wave 1 going on sale
• roundtripjp: the Tigerair Okayama tenth-anniversary NT$1,799 promo
• Travel Watch: Jetstar Japan Super Star Sale
• UDN: China Airlines Taichung to Okinawa launch and frequencies
• Commercial Times: free limousine bus from Okayama Airport
• E.SUN Bank campaign page: July to September travel spending rewards
• Cathay CUBE card site: travel plan reward rates