How to Get the Most out of your Aeroplan Miles Canada


How to Get the Most out of your Aeroplan Miles Canada

Thanks consumatrix for suggesting this very informative article 🙂

This article is a must read for any serious Aeroplan Miles Canada collector. It explain how to book long-distance reward flights in first or business class at the Classic rate.

Click here to read the full Globe and Mail article by Douglas McArthur

Here’s an excerpt:

Follow this plan if you are a basic Aeroplan member and hope to book long-distance reward flights in first or business class at the Classic rate:

Book by phone using an Aeroplan agent. The help you’ll get is worth the $30 fee. And agents have access to reward seats before they show up on the Aeroplan website.

Be prepared to book about 354 days in advance, the approximate time reward seats on Air Canada and some Star Alliance partners become available. They are often gone within an hour. If you miss out, don’t give up. Some partner airlines don’t post their reward seats until days or weeks later.

Start phoning Aeroplan at least a year before you plan to leave. That gives you a few days to figure out what routings and stopovers are possible for your destination, and to pinpoint how many days in advance seats on various airlines become available.

On the day the seats you want are likely to show up, be on the phone when the booking centre opens at 7 a.m. EST. New inventory is often added overnight, although seats can also show up during the day.

If you register in advance for the voice recognition system and memorize the order of the questions you’ll be asked, you’ll reach an agent sooner.

Know what’s possible. You can fly into one city and back from another – this is called an open jaw flight – for no extra points. Also at no extra cost, you are entitled to one long stopover and any number of stopovers of under 24 hours.

If there are no seats on the flight you want, ask the agent for availability on other routings.

All Aeroplan agents are helpful, but some are more knowledgeable than others. If you get conflicting information, ask for a supervisor’s ruling.

Be warned: If one or more of your flight segments are in business or first class, you’ll be charged the mileage rate for that class, even though some of your segments are in economy.

If your booking includes some economy segments, phone back frequently to see if business seats have become available. If that fails, ask if you can be upgraded at the gate for flights with Air Canada. This won’t work for flights with partner airlines. The best place to check availability of Star Alliance reward seats online is on the website of All Nippon Airlines (http://www.anaskyweb.com). Start by joining the ANA Mileage Club online.

It could be a good strategy to book your trip in two stages – the outbound flights on the day they become available and the return flights when they show up some days later. If you wait until your return seats are available, the outbound ones could be taken. To get around this, ask the agent to show your outbound flight as your return segment and to combine it with a “fictitious” flight from your destination to your home city prior to the start of your trip. When the seats you need for your actual return show up, the agent will cancel the fictitious segment. To do this, you will have to pay a change fee of $55 a ticket.

If you are booking two reward tickets on the same flights, it is crucial that you ask the agent to open both files at the same time. That way, if two seats are available, both can be held until the full booking is completed.


3 responses to “How to Get the Most out of your Aeroplan Miles Canada”

  1. Leah Rivera says:

    y3ch9i423rj0gl5c

  2. Lydia says:

    You gave great points here. I made a research on the subject and found nearly all peoples will agree with your blog.

  3. nic says:

    Really??? booking 354 days in advance?!
    Memorizing the order of the questions asked?

    Are you for real? As if this is the only thing I have to do during the day!

    There is no flexibility and very few seats available for aeroplan points. Every time I am stuck in the back (noisy and near the washroom).


















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