Frequent Miler on the Air - What's so great about Air Canada Aeroplan? | Question of the Week Ep12 | 8-17-26

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

Get 15% of on Saily E-SimsThis podcast episode is sponsored by Saily. Saily is an ESIM service app created by the security experts behind NordVPN. Instead of paying absurd daily rates to your home carrier or swapping SIM cards on arrival, Saily gives you flexible prepaid data plans in over 200 destinations worldwide. Download Saily from your app store and use our code FREQUENTMILER at checkout to get 15% off your first purchase. https://saily.com/frequentmilerWhat's so great about Air Canada Aeroplan? We received this question from Dana:I have 300,000 points stuck in Aeroplan, and they will expire in the next year. Instead of transferring more points in or purchasing points to keep them active, I just want to use them. I would like to use them for business class flights to or from Europe. I am flexible on positioning from ORD or the West Coast and want to just get anywhere in Europe. I would even do premium economy on the way back to the US. Most of the "good" redemptions I see are flying through the Middle East or other ridiculous itineraries that would take 18-24 hours to get to Europe. And more direct flights are on Air Canada metal and hundreds of thousands of points. Not worth it in my mind. I am only looking for 2 seats. I like to book a year out, but even looking close in, there's nothing. Everyone always says Aeroplan is a great program, but I'm not seeing it. What am I missing?(01:43) - Advantages of Air Canada Aeroplan:(03:13) - Disadvantages of Air Canada Aeroplan(04:46) - What is Dana missing(05:15) - Use an award search toolLearn about award search tools here(16:22) - Set award alertsSubscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderCheck out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of the Voyascape Network, a collection of some of the world’s best travel podcasts. Explore more at Voyascape.com. For advertising or sponsorship opportunities on this show and across the network, email [e-mail] or you can find more information at Voyascape.com/advertsing.

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. This week's question of the week, what's so great about Air Canada Aeroplane? This question came in from Dana. Dana wrote, I have 300,000 points stuck in Aeroplan, and they will expire in the end of the year. Instead of transferring more points in or purchasing points to keep them, active, I just want to use them. I would like to use them for business class flights to or from Europe. I'm flexible on positioning from Chicago or West Coast and to just get anywhere in Europe. I would

even do premium economy on the way back to the U.S. Most of the good redemptions I see are flying through the Middle East or other ridiculous itineraries that would take 18 to 24 hours to get to Europe. And more direct flights are on Air Canada medal and hundreds of thousands of points. Not worth it in my mind. I'm only looking for two seats. I like to book a year out, but even looking close in, there's nothing. Everyone always says aeroplane is a great program, but I'm not seeing it. What am I missing? I like this question. In part because I'm an Air Canada Aeroplane fan, but also in part because we get this question now and then. Like, this is not, Danny, you're not alone. You're not the only person who's asked this question before. It was precisely the way you did, too, who's come in saying,

I'm seeing all these flights that are hundreds of thousands of points. What am I doing wrong? And it's not necessarily that you're doing something wrong, but we'll talk about how you might do things differently in a minute. Before we hop into that, I wanted to first start with the advantages and disadvantages of Air Canada Aeroplane as I see them, because I think that's sort of the bigger picture here. So the advantages of Air Canada Aeroplaneer, number one, are they don't add any carrier imposed search, There's like some small $19. dollar-ish tax recovery fee that they have in there. But you don't get any of the like fuel surcharge type things that you do with some programs.

So that's nice particularly because they're a Star Alliance airline and Leptonza Group airlines otherwise do have high surcharges. So it's nice to not have them through Air Canada Aeroplane. Of course, United has the same thing. They don't charge those carrier-imposed surcharges either. But Air Canada Aeroplane sometimes has better award pricing. They also allow for complicated mixed partner awards. You can oftentimes mix multiple partners, two, three, four, even more on a single itinerary potentially.

And you don't necessarily want four partners on an award to Europe, I know. But that's one of the advantages to be aware of that you can mix and match things. You can also add a stopover on a one-way award for 5,000 miles. And that might be particularly useful if you're struggling for availability. I'll come back to that in a little bit. and they have a reasonable-ish distance-based award chart. It's sort of a distance and zone combination. So you have to look at, for this example, North America to the Atlantic zone and then calculate the distance you're flying.

But particularly from the East Coast to Europe and in Chicago to Europe and even northern west coast to Europe, you can get decent award pricing to and from Europe in business class cabins. However, there are some disadvantages. First of all, they have awful award charts for select partners, which I'm putting in air quotes if you're listening in podcast form because those select partners originally it was just Emirates, I think, but now United is in there. So sometimes an award with a United Flight might be really expensive or on United Metal might be really expensive and not a reasonable sort of partner award price. So you got to be aware of that.

And I think a big disadvantage is their website kind of stinks in that people are easily distracted by the sky high pricing that you mentioned on Air Canada Airplane Medal or on Emirates Awards or the crazy itineraries that it'll put together. One of the advantages is that you can put together crazy itineraries with Air Canada Aeroplane. But one of the disadvantages is that the website sometimes does put together some pretty crazy itineraries. And you might see those sorted to the top. And that can be really distracting when you see those four. and 500,000 point awards. I'm going to throw in sometimes it's not even obvious how crazy they are, you know, at first glance.

So you might see something that actually looks attractive until you dig in and find out, oh, I'm flying across the ocean in economy and there's a, you know, a 10 foot long business class flight mixed in there somewhere. Right. Right. Yeah, that's a great point because the mixed cabin awards are something that will show up looking like a business class award. And if you're not paying close attention to the details,

Yeah, you could easily miss that. So great point there. All right. So Dana, what are you missing? What's Dana missing here? And to be clear, I don't know for sure because I'm not searching the same routes and dates and things that Dana is. So I'm going to give you some thoughts, some ideas, some things that I think of in response to this question. But there's not necessarily something you're doing wrong. And I want to be clear about that. Maybe you're just not finding awards on the dates and routes that you want. And that does happen from time to time with particular program. programs. However, let's talk about some strategies you can employ to try to be more successful here. First up, you want to use an award search tool. There's so many on the market that are easy to use. I often use award tool, but Poinsia has very similar functionality in terms of being able to search multiple destination airports, multiple origin airports, multiple dates, and kind of customize and sort of easily weed out those ridiculous 18 to 24 hour itineraries pretty quickly by using an award search tool and sorting by business class price. I actually don't usually even see those really crazy price towards because I just don't scroll that far in search

results. Once I get up, you know, over 100,000 points each way, I just stop looking and I look for a different set of dates or a different airport combination. But Greg pointed out that seats.org is probably an even better tool for this, right? Yeah. With seats dot arrow, you know, for your purpose, you can actually just go to, they have an explore feature. where you can explore by program. So you could pick AeroPlan as a program you're looking at. And if you have the pro version of this, you can select to see a full year's worth of data

and pick from North America to Europe as the search criteria, basically, and sort by business class. And you'll see all of the flights that are from like North America to Europe, up that that are like 60,000 points each or 75,000 points. And there will be a lot that will show up. And those are all bookable with AeroPlan. It does pre-cash results. So you have to be where, like, look at each one. It'll say how old the data is for that one. But by clicking on the little information box, it'll rerun that search. And you'll be able to see whether that result is still

there. You'll be able to see how many seats are available for each of those. results and you could also narrow it down further by picking your origin airport or airports plural. So all the ones you're interested in, you know, departing from or going to you can put in and it just makes it so easy to look across a whole year of data and see all those award flights that you haven't been able to find. They're there. And a tool like that will make it easy to find. Yeah, I just now, while Greg was saying that, I pulled up seats. Stadero and I looked for North America to Europe just in the next 60 days for flights in business class with two seats or more. And I've got it on 50 results per page.

And so just going up to ones that cost 75,000 points one way in business class, I'm already past 100 results with two seats available in the next 60 days. So, you know, there's there are a lot out there. And those might not all be perfect. They might not all fit exactly what you want. but bottom line is there are a ton of seats and a tool like that will make it far easier to find the seats that you need. So that's step number one. And I'll mention with that that I regularly see four to five seats or more out of the airports I'm searching. I'm searching New York and Boston usually to Europe and on Laftaunza in particular, very regularly seeing four or five seats within

a couple of months of departure in business class. So I know that those are out there, particularly because I'm often searching those. And just a month ago, I booked, and I was spoiled for choice with different options in terms of which one to pick. Now, I say that, and I'll come back to a technique later on that I employed to get something that fit my needs better than what the search result initially showed me. I would say if you're using a search tool other than seats. arrow, don't necessarily restrict yourself to just Air Canada Aeroplane results. So, for instance, I often use a word tool. and you can filter that to just results from Air Canada. I don't like to do that because I want to also see what's available to United

because sometimes that'll help me find a flight that's available that might be available via Air Canada Aeroplane that I wouldn't have thought to search. Let me give you an example. For instance, I know that Lufthansa has a flight from Raleigh-Durham to Frankfurt, and that's not a route that I ever check. And if I'm searching from Newark to Frankfurt, maybe United, I don't know, maybe United has a flight from Newark to Raleigh Durham, and maybe United is going to show that itinerary available, but Air Canada won't because

United hasn't released the connector to Raleigh Durham. And so if I were limiting my results to Air Canada Aeroplane, I might not see that that flight from Raleigh Durham is available, and maybe you can position to Raleigh Dorm really easily from where you are. So I like to be able to see the results across at least a few different programs, because then it'll help pop up something like if that Raleigh-Durham flight is available. And to be clear, I have no idea how often that Raleigh-Durham flight is available. It's just an example that comes to mind of an airport code that I never put in because I don't live that close to it, but that I might stumble on availability from if I'm looking from multiple airports. Speaking of looking for multiple

airports and stumbling on availability, I recently booked one. And I talked about this, I think, kind of podcast episode. I certainly wrote about it at the blog where I was ultimately looking to get to Bill and Denmark and when I was searching, I wanted to use Air Canada Aeroplane points for this. And I was finding connecting itineraries from Boston to Frankfurt to Billand, but they all included like a 10-hour layover in Frankfurt. And I didn't want that. And so in that kind of situation, though, it's helpful to identify that long overseas flight. Like I knew that Boston to Frankfurt was available, but I didn't like the connections I was getting from Frankfurt to Billand. Well, that's fine. I'm mostly focused on finding that overseas flight first. Then I separately ran a search from Frankfurt to

Billand. And suddenly I found, oh, there was actually a morning flight that would have only had a two-hour layover that was available. But because that segment was only available in economy class, for some reason, it just wasn't showing up as a single award from Boston to Billand. However, with Air Canada's multi-city tool, I was able to put in Boston to Frankfurt on the departure day I wanted and Frankfurt to Billand, connecting two hours after landing in Frankfurt. And sure enough, the tool was able to put those two things together with the multi-city tool. So for me, the overseas flight is the most important one because I can try techniques like that to see, okay, can I put that together separately? If not, maybe I was going to Amsterdam, let's say, well, maybe I could book a really

cheap award on KLM from Frankfurt to Amsterdam, maybe using Virgin Atlantic points or something. I'm less concerned with those short flights at the beginning or the end of the award than I am with the overseas portions of it. So you want to start with kind of looking for those and then see how you might be able to connect the dots. One thing that Dana mentioned was that Dana was willing to position to the West Coast or Chicago. Now, I don't know where Dana is actually located. They started out mentioning Chicago, but then also said that they'd be fine with anywhere on the West Coast. The West Coast of Europe in general is relatively tough to find award availability. So that's already, I think, a tough ask in a lot of ways. And then when you add on top of that, the fact

that the distance is farther from Los Angeles or from San Francisco, probably, then the award pricing goes up some. And so that may not be as attractive to you. But Greg, you pointed out that maybe starting from Seattle would work out well. Yeah, yeah. Going from northern west coast to northern European cities is not as far as your mental map might make you think because of the curvature of the earth. So for example, flights from Seattle, at least nonstop flights, from Seattle to Germany to Frankfurt or Munich, seeing business class available for 75,000 aeroplane points.

So, you know, right there. That's an example of the kind of thing that seats.ero makes very easy to find in no time at all. So that's why we're kind of glowing about that. Yeah, so that's absolutely a really good way to do it. And I just want to back up briefly about Nick was talking about focusing on that overseas part of the route And a way of getting around that awful 12-hour layover, another option is take advantage of Aeroplans, add 5,000 points to add a stopover, because maybe you actually want to spend a couple days in Frankfurt or wherever that first stop is and then go on to your ultimate destination, and you can make that all in one award by using that feature.

Yeah, that's a great point. One that I meant to mention because even if you don't want to spend a couple of days, if you're willing to spend a day, maybe, then, you know, you might be able to find something, you know, for instance, to give my Boston to Billand example, just because it's fresh in mind. Maybe I could have found Boston to Frankfurt on day one, but I couldn't find the Frankfurt to Billon flight within 24 hours. Well, maybe if I looked 25 hours after arriving in Frankfurt, maybe I could spend just one day in Frankfurt and it may cost an additional 5,000 miles, but then boom, there just happens to be award availability on that second segment that I really want. You know, that we run into that sometimes, right? Yeah, exactly. Be careful, though, because sometimes it's, sometimes it's cheaper to combine them into one award like that. And sometimes it's cheaper to have them separate or to do what Nick said and book them as

multi-city rather than one, one whole award like all at once. It just kind of depends on where, how close you are to the next distance space. in the award chart. Yeah, that's a great point. Very true. Very true. And I mentioned already that East Coast tends to be easier. I'm from, I live in the East Coast, so I tend to be looking from East Coast airports.

But I find pretty easy availability from Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. So, you know, consider positioning to one of those cities, perhaps, if you're not finding something from Seattle or the award pricing from L.A. and San Francisco is high. I also consider those airports that maybe aren't big Star Alliance airports. I mentioned Raleigh Durham. I know Detroit's got a couple of Star Alliance flights, right? And there's probably less competition for them. If by a couple, you mean one?

Yeah, we do. Oh, just the one? Just as simple. There's no, Lufthansa flight to from Detroit. Oh, no, I'm sorry. You're right. You're absolutely there. I forgot about Liftonza.

See, that's what I mean. You look from an airport like Detroit because you got somebody like Greg that lives there and doesn't even think about Lufthansa. is an option. And yet they tend to release pretty good availability, at least on the East Coast routes. I haven't checked on the Detroit route. So maybe they just don't ever have it. It comes and goes. Sometimes there's a huge amount of availability and often there's not. It just, yeah, depends. Yeah. Next up, set award alerts. You know, you mentioned that you like to book a year in advance. And sometimes that's really useful. But what Greg just mentioned is also sometimes very relevant that award availability comes and goes. And sometimes you'll see a bunch of year in advance. Sometimes you won't see any a year in advance. And sometimes you won't see any a year in advance. And sometimes you don't see any a year in advance. And one day, all of a sudden, there'll be tons of availability in the next day, none. And if you're not going to sit at your computer every day, searching every hour of every day, which I don't think many of us want to do that, then setting an award alert is a really easy way to find availability. And that's not to say you're going to find it in one day or two days, maybe two months before you see the availability you want for your trip.

But the nice thing is just automating that and letting the tool do the heavy lifting, right? 100% and it's it's not like it's a you know especially if you're starting a year out it's not like it's a miracle if something appears eventually it's very likely um ward space really does come and go over time for a whole variety of reasons and so um you know I think the hard part in some cases is to kind of just trust it you know I get the waiting is the hardest part right yeah Yeah, right. Like I get that you're ready to plan the trip and you want to do it right now. But if you have some, if you have time to wait, set up those alerts, that's, that is, I think, the more important piece of that so that you will get alerted when something appears. Yeah. And I know that can seem tough, particularly if you're someone that needs to set plans far in advance. Like, you know, for instance, if you've got a job where you don't have flexibility and when you can take time off or you have to, you know, request that time. off a year in advance. I worked a state job at one point where we bid vacation six or eight months

in advance or something. And so, you know, you picked a week and that was it. There was no ability to change that later on if I found a great deal some other time. So I understand that situation also. But even in that situation, I think you're better off like setting that week off that you're going to get and setting a bunch of award alerts and just being flexible about where you fly out of or into during that week. And like Greg said, the likelihood is better than you might imagine that you'll find two seats at some point because, I mean, each of the last few years, I've been to Europe at least once and found four to eight seats each time by either setting a word alerts or searching with a wide net. So they do exist, at least, like I said, from the East Coast. And I think also

from other places, I've looked from Chicago a few times before because you're not the first person even from Chicago to come in and say, I'm just never finding the right award seats. And again, I think the award search tools are invaluable for finding those. I think, you know, you really want to check for that. You mentioned premium economy, Dana. And I don't know about you, Greg. I'm not aware of any great uses of Air Canada era plan for premium economy. I know for a while United flights were pricing at $45,000 each way in premium economy to and from Europe. But that was like two or three years ago, I think. I haven't seen anything like that in a long time. And does Lufthansa even do premium economy awards?

I don't know if they do that. I'm not aware of that. So I don't know. That's a good point. When I have looked for premium economy, well, first of all, it hasn't been exclusively with Aero Plan using Aero Plan points. So I wouldn't know about that. But even when you make it broad, you know, broad searches,

there's only so many programs that have award charts for premium economy. And then partners that have premium economy that they make available to partners to book, that combination is very rare. Yeah, and I'm not personally aware of any good uses for Air Canada or a plan for that. If any listeners are aware of something, let me know. I do occasionally search for premium economy awards to and from Europe, and I can't think of a time I've ever seen an Air Canada result that's popped in as something that I might consider. And if you're looking for premium economy to and from Europe, probably better bets are going to be Air France, KLM flying blue, maybe Iberia.

British Airways, obvious, too, for that matter, I suppose Virgin Atlantic for flying Air France or KLM. Those are some of the programs that tend to offer it or American Airlines sometimes to do it with their own miles. So, I mean, there are some out there, but I'm not particularly aware of any sweet spots with Air Canada Aeroplane for premium economy. But hopefully that gives you some tools for your belt, Dana, and some ability to find award availability. Because I think you can find it. The other thing I would say is I know you said you don't want to transfer in more points to keep your points alive. But, you know, if you start to get close to that expiration and you haven't found the award you want, transferring in a thousand additional points is a relatively small price to pay to buy more time until you do find a good use for the miles.

I wouldn't personally fall into using them at really poor value. You know, I wouldn't go using 300,000 points to get a flight to Europe unless you're in a situation where you really want that flight and are willing to pay that much. I'd probably sooner just transfer over a thousand points or even fewer depending on which program you're using to transfer because some programs allow even smaller transfers potentially. So I would do something like that to keep the points alive if you do near expiration. But good luck, Dana. Let us know what you eventually find in book.

This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder, music by Annie Yoder. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today and you'd like to get more of this in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Join our Frequent Myler Insiders Facebook group. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this or give it a thumbs up. If you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for our giant mailbag, you can send that. that too send it to mailbag at frequent myler.com