Hello,
With the upcoming devaluation of the Velocity Frequent Flyer program, I was considering whether it's worthwhile, or possible, to credit future VA flights to AC's Aeroplan program? Could anyone offer any assistance/tips on this? It looks like there are multiple levels of lifetime status too, which gives me something to aim for. Having *A lifetime status of Gold would be something great to obtain.
As I mentioned in the main thread on Virgin, you will need to do your own research for this. It very much depends on your circumstances and how you travel. Your first port of call is to look at your historical travel trends to see where you are travelling to and what airlines you flew. From there you can identify candidate airlines and their frequent flyer programs worth pursuing. Visit their websites for their frequent flyer programs and read up on them. Yes people on this forum can provide guidance but remember not many people will know the intricacies of LATAM upgrades in Brazil or strategies for earning status on Aegean. This is where you'll need to do some sluething (i.e. Googling) to find the answers you're looking for. There's also great travel websites out there with forums and articles that may provide valuable information like
FlyerTalk,
OMAAT,
The Prince of Travel,
TPG to name but a few.
To give you an example of this, earlier this year I needed to fly to South America for a little bit with myself and my partner. The obvious (and arguably only) airline to fly in this instance was LATAM, an airline whose frequent flyer program I knew nothing about, since I never had a need to travel to South America. Well I did some digging around, actually I saw that AFF posted an article about the status match to Qantas and that piqued my interest. So I investigated what the status match was and what the status level I was matched to entailed (LATAM Black). I saw that there were 8 global upgrade certificates I would get. Great. So now how do I use those bloody things? Next thing was looking up those details. Sure enough the
LATAM website had a good explanation for how they worked (including the fare you need to book and upgrade process). But there were still some questions left unanswered. For instance, how do I request those upgrades, and would I be able to add my partner to the upgrade list (and what priority would they be). I asked those questions on the LATAM board of FlyerTalk (not AFF) because they likely have the largest community of LATAM members out there who regularly get to use these benefits and got my answers. Based on that information from AFF, LATAM and FlyerTalk, I ultimately booked qualifying economy flights for myself and my partner, and proceeded to request the upgrades.Sure enough,12 hours before the flight I received an email that my Melbourne to Santiago upgrades cleared and at the lounge in São Paulo that the flight to JFK got upgraded too!
Taking a look at the Aeroplan website, if flying domestically on VA (let's say SYD-MEL for arguement's sake), they class that as 8,000 points. Using their multipliers, it looks like this will earn 4,000 points for a Choice flight and 12,000 points for a Business flight. It looks like the same number of status credits (SQM) are earnt. Therefore, to reach their 50K level (for *A lounge access), it would take just over 4 business flights to reach - is that right; it seems a bit low?
You need to look at the partner charts for each partner you plan on flying with the airline frequent flyer program you are crediting to. So in the case you are flying Virgin Australia, and want to credit to Air Canada Aeroplan. You'll want to look up the accrual on their
airline partners website. Here's the the chart from that:
There's two components to accrual here, one which is Aeroplan points (which can be redeemed for award flights operated by Virgin Australia, Air Canada, Emirates, Etihad and Star Alliance partners like Singapore) and then there's SQM and SQS which is the "currency" you earn towards status. Let's deal with SQM first since that's clearly shown on the chart: you'll earn anywhere from 25% of the miles flown towards SQM on a Choice flight to 150% for a full price business class ticket. So now the next question is how far is Sydney to Melbourne? To answer that we visit
GCMap and enter in the origin (SYD), hyphen, and destination (MEL) which yields this:
So on the low end supposing you bought a cheap lite fare that would net you 110 SQM. If on the other hand you bought an expensive business class ticket that would net you 660 SQM. It sounds like a lot until you realize you need 50,000 SQM (plus this SQD component).
Aside from SQM + SQD, you could earn Aeroplan status based on the number of qualifying segments flown (SQS) + SQD. Any flight segment that earns SQM will earn 1 SQS. So that flight from Sydney to Melbourne will earn on a lite fare 110 SQM and 1 SQS. If earning by SQS you would need to earn 50 SQS. Further details on qualifying for Air Canada status
can be found here.
Is there also a spend component and a minimum number of AC flights/segments?
Yes there is a spend component, that's SQD. For Aeroplan 50K (Star Alliance Gold) specifically that would be $6000 CAD on flights operated by Air Canada, or flights operated by other airlines (like United) but ticketed with Air Canada. Additionally taxes, fees and surcharges are excluded from that amount. In other words you are looking at spending a decent chunk of change with AC to get their status.
Also, if you take connecting flights, let's say HBA-MEL-SYD, do you get twice as many status credits and points (the Aeroplan website lists, HBA-MEL, MEL-SYD, and HBA-SYD all as 8k points)?
Like most airlines Air Canada will compute SQM, SQS and SQD on a segment by segment basis meaning qualifying circuitous routings will generate more SQM and SQS.
Any confirmation, from those with experience with this, would be great.
Regards.
The other thing you want to watch out for is something called orphan mileage. It never makes sense crediting miles to a frequent flyer program you won't use your award points in. Far too often I've seen people rack up several thousand points by crediting to a program that they thought had a better accrual only to not be able to find a way to use those points on an award flight and for those points they worked so hard to earn expire. For Aeroplan specifically they have an expiration policy where all points in your Aeroplan account are forfeited if you have no activity within 18 months. This is something I have to keep an eye on, as my last activity with them was 17 months ago (meaning I'll need to transfer some Canadian AmEx points over to Aeroplan to extend the expiry by another 18 months soon).
With that being said I have over a dozen frequent flyer programs and have strategies to "balance" out the points. But that requires setting up systems and considerable cognitive work to keep running. For most people who don't have a need to travel at the drop of a hat, I'd say, pick a couple of good programs to earn miles with and go from there. It should also be mentioned that there is no requirement to fly an airline to earn points in their frequent flyer program. Aeroplan for instance, will let you buy points (sometimes at a great discount) which in turn can be used to book award flights at incredible value. Just remember, none of these points and award flights will count towards status!
