As someone who has been earning and churning Air Canada Aeroplan miles for many years now it was great listening to Matt's coverage of the program on this week's AFF on the Air Podcast. Whilst the episode did cover quite a few ins and outs of the program including the many airlines that have partnered with Air Canada to provide arguably the most unrivalled award route network out there, there were some finer points that I felt were glossed over and warrant further discussion.
In particular, I direct readers/listeners to the perk where you can add a stop-over for just 5,000 miles. Now I know what you are thinking, what's the big deal here? So what if you can stop over in Perth en-route to Europe? Well there's a couple of benefits to this approach. First, this stop over feature lets you effectively force Air Canada to provide you with a routing where there is business classic award availability. Case in point, I was looking for a flight from Los Angeles back to Sydney for next year. The fact of the matter was no such flight could be found on the dates I wanted to travel in May. However, I was able to find Los Angeles to Seoul and then a couple days later Seoul to Sydney in business class. So I spend 5,000 miles and maybe a couple hundred to for hotels enabling me to visit a new country and get the award seat I want? Not bad!
A related item that can be a real boon for us Australian Frequent Flyers is the fact that we can visit multiple continents for essentially 5,000 miles more. To give you a concrete example: Sydney to London costs 110,000 miles one-way in business class (supposing you find partner business award availability). How much do you reckon a trip to New York is with a stop over in London? 200,000 miles? 250,000 miles? Even more? Nope! It's just 120,000 miles and it is computed as follows: origin: Sydney (Pacific region) destination New York (North America region). Per the award chart the distance flying that routing is over 11,000 miles so we would use the highest bracket in the award chart there 115,000 miles + 5,000 miles for the stop over in Europe. We are literally getting an extra continent for 5,000 miles more. Not bad! And of course you could do the trick in reverse as I did, flying from North America to Asia then continuing on to Australia. Plenty of ways to really stretch those miles out for maximum value!
Like anything miles related there are T&Cs and some ins and outs to get the booking you want. It's not all cakewalk. But there are some really solid value redemptions you can get out of Aeroplan!
-RooFlyer88