Relay like a @duck.com email address that forwards to your gmail or whatever you choose. Custom email would be something linked to your personal domain name, like [email protected].
Yes you can book NZ business class. The issue as Matt pointed out though is that availability tends to be quite scarce compared to other airlines like Singapore or Eva Air. That being said, one particularly good use for Aeroplan points is to fly in economy to New Zealand from Australia since there tends to be quite a decent amount of availability there. The reason I say this is that you can stopover in New Zealand for 5,000 points extra. For instance you could fly Sydney to Christchurch with a 5 day stopover in Auckland:
The real value I would argue is actually finding NZ long haul segments like AKL to SFO or AKL to SIN. Yes they are unicorns to find but boy oh boy is the service in NZ J wonderful! One tool you can use to find these hidden gems is the United award search tool (selecting nonstop flights ex-NZ) which will show you a monthly calendar of dates containing these flights.
With any luck one or more of your segments will hopefully get cancelled or its schedule changed so you misconnect in the weeks leading up to the flight so you get to use Air Canada's rebooking tool which lets you select any flights on partner airlines with availability and the ability to change dates too free of charge:
I think the key is to get it under 2000 miles flown since that would be 22,500 points for the redemption which if the points were bought on a sale would work out to $600 AUD which would make it comparable to the cash fare. Where I could see this work out really well are on destinations within NZ where the domestic fare price can be particularly high.
Could be bad at math here but I reckon a 45% discount is slightly better value than 80% more points (which is effectively a 40% discount).
Where is this documented, please? I'm not seeing it at AirCanada.com. (Now that I've requalified Velocity Platinum I plan to credit upcoming VA flights for my wife and kids to Aeroplan anyway, which should keep them all current beyond that date.)
Great question and hopefully we can get an answer here...I have a ticketed (by Air Canada's Aeroplan) Bamboo flight ...but the Bamboo website will not recognise the PNR from Air Canada.....go figure :~
I booked this route using Aeroplan in December. Ended up adding the Air Canada reference to Checkmytrip and that gave me the VA and QH individual reference number for flights. However, that wasnt very useful in the end. Yes, I could retrieve the booking on Bamboo but I couldn't select my seats.
Whether an Aeroplan PNR will work with a partner depends on whether the partner airline uses the same ticketing system as Air Canada (Amadeus). If they do not use the same ticketing system it's a simple call to Aeroplan to get that partner PNR
I hadn’t thought of crediting VA to Aeroplan.
A short haul flight up to 1000 miles in length would set you back 8,000 Aeroplan points one-way in coach or 20,000 points in business. The only partners in Oceania are Virgin Australia and Air New Zealand. At the same time, Aeroplan regularly has quite lucrative bonus sales on their points, meaning based on your calculus crediting to Virgin may make sense. Where Aeroplan really shines would be stretching out the award redemptions to create round the world itineraries. For instance, last year I bought and burned through 220,000 Aeroplan miles to fly in business class from Sydney to Zurich then Zurich to Toronto followed by LA to Seoul and Seoul to Sydney. This is possible because their award chart is based on distance flown and the originating and final destination region with a stopover being added for just 5,000 more points. The other thing that Aeroplan has in spades are partners, all the Star Alliance partners plus Emirates and Etihad, Virgin Australia, Azul, Gol, Oman Air, Gulf Air, etc.
