Aeroplan (Air Canada) is now selling points

jgm said:
Now I only have to find a better return route which is currently YXC-YVR-ICN-BKK-SIN-MEL with the BKK-SIN-MEL portion in Y on separate tickets.
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Return route opened up yesterday. 83.5k each YXC-YVR-SYD-CBR-MEL. The flight leaves 2 days later which will give us 2 more days skiing, and we arrive one day later. The cost was ~$300, but I saved 11k points. The biggest issue was the cost of cancelling the LifeMiles awards I had BKK-SIN-MEL.
 
Points are back on sale for the next few days.

Get up to 100% bonus points on your purchase when you buy 4,000+ points. Offer ends January 25, 2023. ​

Buy 4,000 - 29,000 points, receive a 50% bonus ​

Buy 30,000 - 55,000, receive a 60% bonus ​

Buy 60,000+ points, receive a 100% bonus​



The price of a mile under this offer is 1.3 US cents each when you buy them at a 100% bonus.
 
annielee said:
newbie to aeroplan, can i ask whether is 100% bonus points is the max offered ?
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The real question you should be asking is whether you can get any value out of the points bought. Simply buying points in the hope that it will work out is foolhardy at best. In particular you should have a specific trip in mind which has business class award availability on Aeroplan. In that way you can compare how much it would cost to buy miles (and pay the taxes & fees) to book that dream vacation versus paying out of pocket with a cash ticket. It is true that you can get great value out of these offers, though. In particular, I bought $2,800 CAD for 160,000 miles back in July during one of these promotions, then transferred over a further 60,000 AmEx points to Aeroplan for 220,000 miles which I used to book this quasi-round the world trip all in business class:
  1. Sydney to Zurich on Virgin Australia/Etihad Business class (Virgin J down to MEL followed by Etihad J from Melbourne to Zurich via Abu Dhabi)
  2. Zurich to Toronto on TAP Air Portugal (via Lisbon) again in Business Class
  3. Los Angeles to Seoul on Asiana in business class on their new (to me) A380
  4. Seoul to Sydney on Asiana in business class
You can price out those tickets however you'd like but they will easily be well above $6,000 CAD I reckon, if not more, and I spent roughly $3,200 CAD between buying the points and paying the various taxes and fees
 
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I agree that anyone wanting to buy should broadly check aeroplan’s partners fly where they want to go, but Aeroplan is the one program I will buy miles speculatively.

It’s so versatile that a trip to bangkok, tokyo, USA or Europe are all on the cards. I’ll use them for something.
 
Thanks for all the kind advise, im only new to Aeroplan (redeemed United and Lifemiles previously) And ive already got few planning trip this year hence asking the max bonus points.
1. AU - KUL/SN in Mar 2023 (for 2 pax)
2. KUL - HND/KIX/ICN in Oct 2023 (for 3 pax))
3. AU- HND/KIX/ICN in Oct 2023 (for 3 pax))

And there maybe more by end of the year.. will be using all 3 programs since still have miles pre-covid for United and Lifemiles.
 
I'm going to buy some aeroplan speculatively.

I booked LGW-HAN on Bamboo J for 80k in mid June. I'm based in AKL but couldn't get it to work any other way to get to AKL, so I have HAN-AKL on SQ J with AS for 65k miles as well. Not the cheapest option but just glad to get any availability at the moment. Also got Innsbruck-LHR via Frankfurt on aeroplan for 7.5k points + fees.

Love the Aeroplan booking site. There were cheaper deals I've just found out with Turkish airlines but I'm not into ringing up to make bookings etc. So between AS & AC they've got my money this year. I did notice though you have to buy 60k points with the AC bonus offer to get the 100% bonus which is $2k CAD. Not a small amount, I guess. Will buy another lot in November when they hopefully have another 115% bonus offer.
 
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Ecco said:
I'm going to buy some aeroplan speculatively.

I booked LGW-HAN on Bamboo J for 80k in mid June. I'm based in AKL but couldn't get it to work any other way to get to AKL, so I have HAN-AKL on SQ J with AS for 65k miles as well. Not the cheapest option but just glad to get any availability at the moment. Also got Innsbruck-LHR via Frankfurt on aeroplan for 7.5k points + fees.
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Your best bet, IMHO is to use the stopover feature (which costs just 5,000 points extra) on Aeroplan to force business award availability to appear. In your example you can book LGW to AKL with a stopover in HAN since as you pointed out there was SQ partner J availability and since SQ is a partner of Aeroplan, in theory that option should appear in an award search. I should also point out that you need to start thinking in terms of Emirates. They fly nonstop out of DXB to AKL and from what I hear they offer reasonable service to boot! Remember, Emirates serves a ton of European cities meaning all you need to do is locate the availability of just 2 sectors: Europe to DXB then DXB to AKL. In some instances you may need to stopover for a day or two to make the availabilities line up but can be worth it.

And I say all of this having experienced this process first hand. Back in late 2021 it was easy to find award availability wherever you wanted to go. Heck, I even booked the elusive AC 33/34 between Sydney and Vancouver in saver business class because no one had a clue when things would reopen in Australia. But my last booking (SYD to Toronto and back) required me to do a stopover in Europe to make business class saver availability appear, which in my case was no skin off my nose since there were some good reasons for me to be there anyway. Similarly on the way back I had to stopover in Seoul for a couple of days since flights between the West Coast of North America and Sydney were either unavailable (for partners) or prohibitively expensive (for Air Canada).
Ecco said:
Love the Aeroplan booking site. There were cheaper deals I've just found out with Turkish airlines but I'm not into ringing up to make bookings etc. So between AS & AC they've got my money this year. I did notice though you have to buy 60k points with the AC bonus offer to get the 100% bonus which is $2k CAD. Not a small amount, I guess. Will buy another lot in November when they hopefully have another 115% bonus offer.
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I'd recommend looking at the United award search engine. The reason I say this is they let you search a month at a time for business saver awards across Star Alliance partners and Virgin Australia. This can be really useful in finding that elusive flight to get you home!

-RooFlyer88
 
i’m not sure star alliance has access to all SQ’s long haul J class? Or has that recently changed? It might be an arrangement with AS/SQ?
 
This morning I was looking at a date with Aeroplan showing 4 x J SQ awards MEL-LHR. The same flights aren't available with KF miles even for 1 pax. Is the website reliable or is this likely to be phantom availability?
 
MEL_Traveller said:
i’m not sure star alliance has access to all SQ’s long haul J class? Or has that recently changed? It might be an arrangement with AS/SQ?
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There's been discussion on the US sites that Aeroplan specifically (not MileagePlus or LifeMiles or any other Star programs) has been able to access some of the SQ saver business space that generally is unavailable to partners.
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I speculatively checked the JFK-FRA routing when this was mentioned a few weeks back and found space on Aeroplan for some dates. But I didn't book and can't independently confirm it's valid.
 
kangarooflyer88 said:
Your best bet, IMHO is to use the stopover feature (which costs just 5,000 points extra) on Aeroplan to force business award availability to appear. In your example you can book LGW to AKL with a stopover in HAN since as you pointed out there was SQ partner J availability and since SQ is a partner of Aeroplan, in theory that option should appear in an award search. I should also point out that you need to start thinking in terms of Emirates. They fly nonstop out of DXB to AKL and from what I hear they offer reasonable service to boot! Remember, Emirates serves a ton of European cities meaning all you need to do is locate the availability of just 2 sectors: Europe to DXB then DXB to AKL. In some instances you may need to stopover for a day or two to make the availabilities line up but can be worth it.

And I say all of this having experienced this process first hand. Back in late 2021 it was easy to find award availability wherever you wanted to go. Heck, I even booked the elusive AC 33/34 between Sydney and Vancouver in saver business class because no one had a clue when things would reopen in Australia. But my last booking (SYD to Toronto and back) required me to do a stopover in Europe to make business class saver availability appear, which in my case was no skin off my nose since there were some good reasons for me to be there anyway. Similarly on the way back I had to stopover in Seoul for a couple of days since flights between the West Coast of North America and Sydney were either unavailable (for partners) or prohibitively expensive (for Air Canada).

I'd recommend looking at the United award search engine. The reason I say this is they let you search a month at a time for business saver awards across Star Alliance partners and Virgin Australia. This can be really useful in finding that elusive flight to get you home!

-RooFlyer88
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Thanks roo for those helpful suggestions. I’ll look into emirates to EUR-AKL next. I’ve been spending far too much time on the aeroplan site lately… just came to aeroplan lately. I kept thinking it was too complicated and didn’t look into it until I found this thread.

I did see there was availability out of London to go to Hanoi via DXB but I read some adverse reports about the 777business class and their seats not reclining fully and there being less direct aisle seats than the A380. So I booked the Bamboo flight which is direct. Just also read in OMAAT about the VATC pod hotel at Hanoi airport which will come in handy as my flight arrives at 5.30am! Unless I can find a lounge airside, that I can access.

btw Just to clarify there is availability from akl-sin on SQ via AS in J for 65k points if you book 8 months out. also I saw some SQ flights from Europe to asia via aeroplan as well.

However that round the world trip I stitched together with AS and AC has cost me 270k points which isn’t exactly cheap. for anyone interested (you may or may not be…) it’s as follows:

AKL-NAN-LAX-JFK on Fiji airways J, AS 55k stopover LAX
JFK-HEL-VIE on Finnair J, AS 70k, stop over HEL
LGW-HAN on Bamboo J, AC 80k (big surcharge)
HAN-SIN-AKL on SQ J, AS 65k

Im sure people on here could do better with less points via AC. However I lined up all of this last year and premium availability is a bit tough now on some of those routes for may/June. The stopovers in Lax and NY are expensive too. I managed to get Park Hyatt Vienna with some hyatt points too. I also have option to try and get those LH last minute awards via air nz airpoints as I’m domiciled in Nz and can access them. That chart looks cheap but I haven’t tried using airpoints partner awards yet.
im definitely interested if there is a meet up in Oz. I need to talk to some of you aeroplan geeks. This site is tremendous and one of the nicest ones around as far as miles and points go. Much more civilised than some other sites.
 
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Another thought for you to consider - do you really need to make your final destination Auckland? The reason I ask is there's tons of availability to Christchurch from Heathrow, and I reckon it shouldn't be too hard to make Christchurch the stopover point and fly onwards from Christchurch to Auckland. As an example here are the results I am finding on the 14th of June between Heathrow and Auckland:

Screenshot 2023-01-23 at 03.31.59.png
 
kangarooflyer88 said:
Another thought for you to consider - do you really need to make your final destination Auckland? The reason I ask is there's tons of availability to Christchurch from Heathrow, and I reckon it shouldn't be too hard to make Christchurch the stopover point and fly onwards from Christchurch to Auckland. As an example here are the results I am finding on the 14th of June between Heathrow and Auckland:

View attachment 314904
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Thanks roo! That’s awesome. More work today… I will look into this. Christchurch could be an option. Still want to do Hanoi stopover but I have flexibility. I could just buy a flexi NZ fare from CHC-AKL. I noticed NZ is also releasing OOL-AKL award space too. Might have to rebook my whole schedule. Could save quite a few points…
 
Hi all, I'm checking if it is viable to buy Aeroplan points for redeeming trips to India? I'm planning HBA-BOM Dec 23 - Jan 24 in J (for 2 pax) - preferrably not in Air India. I'm aware it may be difficult due to busy time of the year but seeing if anyone has done it previously.
 
fuzzydunlop said:
Hi all, I'm checking if it is viable to buy Aeroplan points for redeeming trips to India? I'm planning HBA-BOM Dec 23 - Jan 24 in J (for 2 pax) - preferrably not in Air India. I'm aware it may be difficult due to busy time of the year but seeing if anyone has done it previously.
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You can do single searches on the aeroplan website even if you’re not a member. That might give you some idea on options. I appreciate we’re just outside the booking window for your dates but if you were to look at a similar peak period it might give you some ideas.

I find air india business class on the 787 to be ok. Other options might include Singapore Airlines or Thai. Search out of Sydney and Melbourne. There should be ok availability for connecting flights out of HBA on VA.
 

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