How Do You Find Good Award Deals With Aeroplan?

What about redeeming on all this extra SQ availability? 😉

@ ann -- Hah, hopefully soon enough...

Just did this for several trips I am managing. Part of me is thinking people are in the "planning and switching around itins" for their trips next year.

I'm not sure if the "book out of major international gateways with no domestic connecting itin" rule applies to Canada, but for my Europe trip, I just focused on itins to/from Toronto and to a smaller extent, Montreal for Canada and east-coast cities in the US. Also focusing on lesser-known routes with lower demand or non-Star Alliance hubs. The Swiss route JFK-GVA. TAP Portugal's route MIA-LIS and maybe even the EWR-OPO route (less than expected availability when I checked). United's route BOS-LHR. That and looking at trends based on direction of travel. Europe-to-North America routes have from what I have seen, better award availability than North America-to-Europe.

Also in general, supply and demand. Award availability on the most desirable airlines to fly gets taken the soonest it is released into the wild. You see an acceptable but not ideal itin, you book it to grab it, then you keep looking for itins that are more to your liking. I waited on booking for the trips I am managing and missed out on a lot of award availability on EVA in J and TAP's A330neo in J. Just my two cents. Also, Aeroplan's phone lines were swamped when I called in to change my itin. Just keep calling even if the message says "sorry we are closed, please call back between [hours]" and you are calling back in that timeframe.

I am SQ PPS and there is very little availability. I tried to book the newly released SIN to MEL (where I now live) and could not get anything. Could see things in J though.

Hi ban
Im a big fan of the blog
Thanks for your effort.
I have a wird question.
I leve in Israel and my eyes os on the
Availability for next aug
between Israel and Europe
With turkish airlines .
For the last 2 months is so fantastic Availability and pricing.
(20k on business )
It's has for various of destinations
Like gva,zrh,lys ext..
And then last week I tried to see egain
But turkish is dropped from all flight Availability in July/Aug. From tlv
I want to ask you if it's normal
And If you believe thy will return to the table.

I agree it's delightful to find those rare partner itineraries and they offer great value. But this "How To" piece doesn't actually show how, cuz it's nearly impossible right now. For Canadians (the main market for Aeroplan) the new Aeroplan has effectively wiped out value for nearly all premium travel. Business Class fares (in points) are sky high on Air Canada metal, offset by eUps only for those with elite status. So if you want to bring aunt Blabby to Toronto (or Houston, via Toronto) from Budapest, she'll be flying economy. Oneway nonstops on heavy routes like London (Ben's example) or California have quintupled in price in Business class and only AC status passengers can pay less. The search engine pushes travellers through Canadian gateways, raising prices even on US-originating overseas trips. LA to Bangkok? Connect in YVR and pay hundreds of thousands for the trip. So, when you encounter enthusiasm for Aeroplan 2.0, it's from people who have AC Status and use eUpgrades. Partner bookings? So rare they're not a thing right now. Beware the snake oil salesman promising "more choice" or "every seat availble on points". It's lots of lipstick on an apocalyptic deval.

The mismatch here is that the average consumer will think "Hey! I hear Air Canada has a great program - let's see what they have to and from Canada!" and it turns out getting to Canada on Air Canada metal is the worst way to redeem the miles. I provided the example of getting to Vancouver for ski season, with flights costing 150K to 200K each way to go from JFK to YVR in J.

I guess this begs the question - which airlines consistently have the most availability and decent pricing on their own metal? Forget about partners.

Etihad has been playing games with married segment logic even with stopovers. I found F on iAd-Auh but any additional flights only showed in economy even with a stopover. Calling didn’t help either and they even checked with ticketing. Etihad is throttling availability if you are seeking a stopover.

@Lucky Oman Air flights have been removed from Aeroplan.

Whilst the fees are trash, can't fault BA for their approach. Opening up 4 seats in every single flight for booking with avios means there's hope for everyone...

Exactly. A more accurate title might have been “It is possible to find awards on Aeroplan. Look, I found some!"

I think that has to be Flying Blue.

Strange… I was able to book iad to Auh in F then do a 2 night stopover and continue into Seoul in business class all on one ticket. It was also for 2 people.

Great post!!! Thank you!!

Yes, the fees on BA are horrible. Flying from the West Coast to Europe, I just pay cash now (when they have discounted fares) and use Avios to fly everywhere else except to Europe. I even have a companion pass and didn't think that the value I got for the points + fees was worth it.

@Lucky Oman Air flights have been removed from Aeroplan.

DenB is 100% Spot-on!

This post is a perfect example of the dirty little lies that dishonest bloggers tell. Don't believe the lies.

Aeroplan is great! Yeah, sure...you can find one seat to some obscure destination but only if you live the life of a blogger: you have to wait to do trip planning until 2 days before the flight, stitch together some crazy routing that works, then you drop everything in your life, grab your toothbrush, and head off on Ubangi Airways for a trip to Rangoon, with a 3-day stopover in Kabul. No worries, you don't have a job, a mortgage to pay or a family. It's a great value!!!

But bloggers have bills to pay, and they need your clicks to pay them. Suckers...

Searching segment by segment only gets you so far... When I've tried booking it, agents often tell me they can't add that flight on. I've encountered that issue with LH, SQ, and SK. I know others who have that problem with BR, lots of married segment and unmarried segment logic going on in the background...

Aeroplan is borderline dishonest, advertising Oman Air and Ethiopian as partners when neither has had award availability through Aeroplan for a while now.

For some of you who’ve been on here for a long time, is it true that Ben used Aeroplan heavily for award redemption in the past?

Is it taboo to talk about tools? I paid for 3 tools recently, and wish I had one that simply showed the month and the availability for that month.
It's quite infuriating to have to go day by day from either yow YUL or yyz.
One of tools searches all MR transfer partners and Aeroplan, it will search dozens of reward partners but I only have these two. Clearly they can search daily.. They should just say.. I'll search the month but it's a 5-10 min query. Fine I'd freaking pay and wait for results.
Save those results and run 3 searches. Leaving and arriving various cities.. Suddenly you're looking at a dash board of options.
Add in layovers..
Blam
Given there's dozens of points booking services. I bet there's tools that do this.

This might explain why their participation in Aeroplan was so short lived:
https://onemileatatime.com/news/oman-air-oneworld/

Ben: I suggest you drop mention of them when discussing Aeroplan rewards, They have in practice already exited!

Last 20 days I booked Etihad ORD-AUH-JNB in J for a safari next August. 110K Aeroplan points per person. I understand this sounds a little high, but chase was also doing a 30% transfer bonus at the time so the actual cost was 85k URP + $61.00 CAD…. That’s a great deal in my book. Again this was the middle of last month. I’ve used Aeroplan a number of times for good to great redemptions. I even speculatively transferred additional URP for the next redemption.

Yeah, married segments are problematic. EY is bad for this. I'm still not convinced Aeroplan is a good program

Well said!

I can relate to the comment about 2nd (or 3rd) tier airlines, like Air India, popping up regularly padding out various itineraries. Thanks but no thanks!
Also irritating is finding the perfect routing on Etihad Business, or even 1st, and finding there is a 9 or 14 hour layover in AUH.
The identical flight with perfect layover time (less than 2 hrs) is available there only in Economy. grr.....
In common with other FF programs (lookin' at you AlaskaMP) Aeroplan is a big fan of offering heaps of Mixed Cabin awards.
Who is going to fork out a full serve of Business Class miles for an award "6% in Business Class" ? Not me, that's for sure!
Other than that I like Aeroplan, and especially like paying for miles in $CAD rather than inflated $US.

That's great.

However, Etihad is neither Oman Air nor Ethiopian.

Fairly pleased with being to transfer CSR to Aeroplan, especially in November with the 30% bonus. Found a workable GF itinerary in J. That said, about a week before, there was extensive WY availability, including in F. It seems to be gone now. Re: SQ, there was some SQ J availability, but almost every itinerary, the long-haul SQ was in Y (hence 'mixed cabin'). I think Aeroplan has some potential and I'll continue to consider it.

I am hoping to find two premium economy seats for 100,000 miles per ticket or less from Amsterdam to SFO on Air Canada next October. Would anyone care to venture a guess as to whether my expectations are realistic????

Excuse my responce, as I had miss-read Ethiopain.

I've booked Oman in the past with Aeroplan (about 6 months ago), for how long have these two partners not come up in the search results? You would think Ethiopain would be easy enough to list...

Agreed that it’s hard to find saver level business class tickets with Aeroplan or anyone else, and near impossible if far in advance. Pay with points prices are often superior if getting 1.5 cents per point with Chase Sapphire Reserve or 1.54 cents per point with Amex Business Platinum. Award ticket prices on many airlines are hovering around 1 cent per point, or worse.

The effort required to find Business Saver right now is almost not worth it; they’re out there, but kind of unicorns, and if you don’t have a lot of schedule flexibility, forget it. I have also tried tools like point.me but the results have been disappointing. I am just trying to accept the “lower-price” Standard awards as the new saver (e.g. 60K for UA transcon vs 100K or 120k, 155K for UA intl vs 255K or 275K) but that doesn’t help at all when trying to find partner tickets.

So I just open as many cards as I can and prepare to blow a lot of points and miles.

I am hardly an expert in this domain but over the next decade I expect a total revamping of the partner system for award tickets: the notion of “saver” vs “standard” feels like a legacy, outdated concept for carriers as they march towards chartless, dynamic pricing.

You should also write in your blog that ALOT of times it’s bogus availability specially on etihad. When you are finally ready to pay error returns, etihad has been stingy in releasing award seats on most routes. Secondly i will give you $100 bill if you find me one seat in Oman air on any of their routes like London, bangkok, frankfurt and Paris. Lastly, i don’t lnow why you are obsessed so much about aeroplan that
Last time you posted about bogus availability of Singapore Business class long haul via aeroplan and none of the seats were bookable. Kindly have something solid before you post

Correct so are the J in SQ

I didn't get which webpage you search through. Please clarify! Thanks!

I am a senior and have been saving points for over 15 years, hoping that one day I could fulfil my dream to fly business class from Toronto to an Asian country. I had nearly reached that point two years, only to see that Aeroplan has increased their points to redeem for the business class. Once again, it's out of reach. The mixed class routes are very unfair, when you are redeeming business class points. I want to travel on Star Alliance flights, business class all the way, to Singapore or Bangkok but cannot find them on the aeroplan site. Can someone please advise me.

Longtime Aeroplan User here - The only way to book premium flights now at the ‘old’ prices like 60k to Europe or 75k to Asia, is to be very flexible, book within the last month or so, and check Aeroplan several times per day. They will release the ‘normal’ pricing once in a while, but only for a half-day or less, and randomly it seems. I checked every day all day for weeks until I found J seats to Tokyo for my trip last month. Take what you can find early like PE and then keep checking so you can make changes closer in. I booked pe non-stop yyz-Nrt for 100k and then changed to J for only 72k flying thru Yvr with Ana. The return leg was only 67k for j with Ana again thru yvr. And always have a backup plan to pay cash for some segments or use other FF plans on multi-itineraries. D’ONT fall for the 200-400k pricing, it’s criminal. AC premium is still out there but takes lots of effort over weeks to find when it briefly pops up.

Ethiopian has been unavailable for the majority of 2022. It comes back for a few days and disappears again.

Oman Air comes and goes from time to time. I too was able to book them in June, but when I wanted to make a change in August, the links were down again and I had to stick with my original flights. Seems like it is off again right now.

I saw similar issues with South African Airways in July - availability visible to other Star Alliance partners was not showing up on Aeroplan, but that got resolved and seems to be ok now.

They probably have these issues with other partners too - it is just that these are the ones I check often and hence the ones I notice.

I still think that the smart people at AC check where you are searching from the search is done and restrict Canadians from accessing anything reasonable. Solution would be a VPN and select the US or? Just check the options offered for Air Canada Credit Cards in the US and compare to the mainstream AC cards in Canada.

In the past, not to the same degree as now. At least not until AA and others went to and price-based awards charts/fares. His fave was AA and AS. Then this dried up. Avianca has always been a good choice, too. But for most *A awards, that wasn’t until fairly recently - last few years.

The above said, he didn’t ignore AC and Aeroplan at all, it just wasn’t quite the topic of discourse it is today because they were so many other options of similar or better value. AC gets a lot of press now because, like Ben says, it’s probably the best awards redemption airline out there more.

@ azamaraal -- Hah, I can promise that's not the case. Aeroplan isn't blocking partner awards for those in Canada. And yes, US credit cards are more rewarding than Canadian credit cards, but that comes down to the US being a much more lucrative credit card market, so that's not Aeroplan specific.

@ Fred -- The screenshots are from aircanada.com.

@ Wasiq -- Oman Air availability has been pulled briefly due to a technical glitch, and should be back shortly. As far as Singapore Airlines availability goes, that should also be back shortly.

@ Paul B -- If you put some effort into it, you should be able to get business class seats for less than that. Good luck! 🙂

@ Steve -- Both Oman Air and Singapore Airlines awards should be back shortly, these are technical glitches that Aeroplan is working on resolving.

@ Hans -- Depends how far back you want to go. Going back a decade, Aeroplan was also my favorite program in the world. Aeroplan allowed round the world first class awards for 120K points with two stopovers, in addition to the destination. I can't count the number of awards I booked through Aeroplan at the time. As you'll see, that was first on my list of awesome redemptions from the "good old days."
https://onemileatatime.com/insights/good-old-days-redeeming-miles/

@ Rob -- This is a technical glitch, and they should be back soon. This has nothing to do with Oman Air potentially joining oneworld.

@ Sean M. -- I totally get your frustration, though I think some perspective here is also important. Unlike some other programs, Aeroplan puts effort into making sure there's as little phantom availability as possible. When there's a partner with lots of phantom availability or ticketing issues, Aeroplan pulls that space, and tries to resolve it with the partner (and as you might expect, not all partners are equally fast at getting things fixed).

Aeroplan is having technical issues with Oman Air, and those redemptions should be back soon. It's my understanding that it's an easy fix, but it just takes a second, given that Oman Air has to be involved.

Meanwhile with Ethiopian Airlines, several Amadeus-hosted Star Alliance carriers have pulled this availability. It's my understanding that this is because Ethiopian has been showing I9X9 on every flight, the airline accepts the booking, and then after ticketing it comes back as unconfirmed.

While I know Aeroplan and other Star Alliance partners are working on resolving this, this obviously presents a major issue, and until that's fixed, space has been pulled. Like I said, Aeroplan isn't the only Star Alliance program to pull space for this reason, and the hold-up here is with Ethiopian Airlines getting this fixed.

@ Shmulik -- Thanks for reading! Turkish Airlines can be really quirky with award availability, and it's not unusual to see the airline sometimes release a lot of space, and then at other times not release much space. So I'm not surprised to see Turkish going from one extreme to the other. I'd recommend keeping an eye on availability, and I wouldn't be surprised if it opens again.

Easily solved with an AVS recap, and easily worked around with manual long sales. Sorry, but that is excuses rather than reasons.

It also surprises me that it only affects some Amadeus hosted carriers but not others (eg. LifeMiles) given that Sabre-Amadeus have a standard AVS link across partitions. Unless some are using Type B messaging or API links, this should not happen in isolation - which leads me to believe the issue may be on the Amadeus end rather than Sabre.

@ Sean M. -- Good news, Ethiopian Airlines awards are back with Aeroplan!

Good availability for YYZ-X-BKK through AUH or ADD next October for 87.5k/115k, respectively

AMS-LIS-SFO on TP for 90k points on Oct 2, 9, 16, 17
AMS-YYZ-SFO on AC for 92k points on Oct 5, 16, 23, 26

how shortly? it's been a couple weeks now.

Hi Ben,

Can we get an update on the state of award seat availability booking and if the best time to book an award flight has changed since this post? I'd be interested to know your thoughts on what you think about this as it pertains to the major airlines worldwide. Appreciate it!