Aeroplan has a search engine similar to the Air Canada search engine. You’d be forgiven for thinking that they would produce the same results only with points as currency instead of dollars. You’d be wrong.
The Aeroplan search engine, although integrated into Air Canada, is entirely separate behind the scenes and, somewhat paradoxically, presents both more options, and less options, than the Air Canada search engine. Air Canada is part of the Star Alliance group of airlines. Aeroplan has additional partners outside of the Star Alliance. For example, Etihad and Virgin Australia flights are not available in the Air Canada search engine but are available in the Aeroplan search engine. By the same token, Air Canada search results may show every domestic flight between two cities on a given day, whereas Aeroplan may only show some of them. An oddity, considering every Air Canada seat is supposed to be available to Aeroplan. In reality, they often are not.
In addition to Star Alliance partner code share flights, Aeroplan’s search engine allows you to book flights that have nothing to do with Air Canada, for example, a flight from Germany to South Africa on Lufthansa. Typically, the Air Canada search engine would not show that flight unless it was added on to another flight using Air Canada aircraft, for example, Toronto-Germany-South Africa.
Where Aeroplan’s search engine falls short is that the default list of flight options you’re shown for any departure and destination pair is usually just a fraction of what is actually available. Knowing this single fact is key to understanding how to get the most out of Aeroplan.
Let’s look at an example. Say you want to fly from Calgary (YYC) to Zurich (ZRH) in July. If you go into Air Canada you’ll get a dozen or so results, all with one stop in either London (LHR), Montreal (YUL), Toronto (YZZ), Frankfurt (FRA) or Vancouver (YVR). Many will have one of the segments flown by a partner airline, but all will have at least one segment flown on Air Canada.
Now, the same search using Aeroplan will get you over 6 dozen results with routes up to 4 segments long (3 stops), some entirely on partner airlines and a dozen connecting airports (All the ones above plus Berlin (BER), Geneva (GVA), Los Angeles (LAX), Munich (MUC), Newark (EWR), San Fransisco (SFO) and Vienna (VIE). Even though that’s triple the options, it is but a small fraction of what is available. For example, it’s entirely possible to fly from Calgary to Zurich via Abu Dhabi (AUH) using Aeroplan. It’s just not an option they present to you. You’ll have to call in to get that itinerary booked.
There’s a ton of information that I can teach you that’ll help understand what the bounds are with respect to valid itineraries, but for now just know that there are countless options.
Aeroplan also allows extended stopovers in one city per one-way trip for a small surcharge in points (5000). This can be used to build vacations in multiple places all on one ticket. Such as YYZ-FRA stopover FRA-IST destination IST-HND stopover HND-YYZ would allow extended stays in Frankfurt, Istanbul and Tokyo all on one round trip ticket. Because a valid connection when travelling overseas is any stop less than 24 hours, you could also do short one-day visits using connections spaced just under 24hrs. So your HND-YYZ segment could actually be HND-ICN-YYZ if you wanted. If you arrived in Seoul (ICN) at say, 10pm and the departing flight was at 8pm the next day, you could spend a day in Seoul.
It’s even possible to do a “Round the World” trip in this way, stopping at several places for a day and 3 places for extended stops all on one round trip ticket. Remember, when you fly on the right planes in BizClass, you get a lie-flat bed so you can sleep on the planes between stops, saving you hotel fares as well.
How to Find All Possible Routings
I like to build my trips backwards. Say i want to go to Sydney, Australia (SYD) from YYC. The most direct route is YYC-YVR-SYD. That is also a very costly route and one of the only options presented on the search engine. In fact, you may find that even when there are several routes presented, all go via YVR. This is because the Vancouver-Australia segments are the most profitable for Air Canada. For a fraction of the cost in points you can also go from Canada to Australia via Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand or South Korea (among others). How do I know where to find these? There’s a program on the web called Flight Connections that allows you to select any airport and see all the direct flights in or out of that airport. You can also sort by Star Alliance (if you get the paid version) although you can also simply sort by airlines on the free version and use a list of Star Alliance and Aeroplan partners as your guide.
Building the route in reverse would start by finding all the flights into SYD:
Clicking on each route will show details of the flight. Use that information to search in Aeroplan. For example, Tokyo Haneda (HND) to SYD. Then you simply need to find options to Tokyo, for example YVR-HND or YVR-NRT (incedentally, you can use the code TYO in Aeroplan to simultaneously search both of Tokyo’s airports: HND and NRT). If the segment YVR-HND is bookable on Aeroplan and the segment HND-SYD is available on Aeroplan, and the time between the Arrival of the 1st segment and departure of 2nd segment is sufficient to make a connection and is less than 24hrs, then the flight YVR-HND-SYD can be booked on Aeroplan. You’ll just need to call in to get an agent to piece it together.
Not all Aeroplan agents are competent enough to assist on more complex routings. If you run into problems on an itinerary that should be valid that the agent won’t piece together, you may have to hang up and call again. You can avoid issues by knowing all the details in advance and feed them the flight itinerary segment by segment with Airline, Date, Flight number, departure time, arrival time.
There is a lot more you can know that is helpful, but for now the key is to use Flight Connections to search segments (in reverse), then use Aeroplan to search individual segments to build a complete itinerary that goes where you want, for the price you want. I’ll have another post later that talks about Aeroplan pricing and how their search engine results are often hugely overpriced and how to find the deals. Until then, use this as a guide: Aeroplan Flight Reward Chart In the chart you’ll notice everything is based on distance. How do you know how far it is say from YYC to Tokyo Narita (NRT) or YVR to SYD? You need to look it up on another website called the Great Circle Mapper. You’ll need to know the 3 character codes for airports and searches can be entered like this: YYC-YVR-BNE-SYD which will show the distances between each segment between Calgary and Sydney as well as the total. These are found in the Flight Connections maps but you can also simply google them. Be mindful that some cities have more than one airport. New York and Osaka each have 3!
Lastly, I will say that planning in advance is key. I will usually book my flight a year in advance. For each Air Canada flight, especially the long haul flights, there are usually only 2 seats in BizClass that are available at the lowest points cost. When they are gone, the price goes up. People cancel flights, and sometimes more cheap seats are made available, but it can be hit and miss when looking for flights just a few months out. For best pricing, booking a year out consistently offers the best deals.
There are a lot of little tricks I know to snag the best deals, which I will reveal later. Different airlines release their cheap reward seats at different times in advance, and at certain times of day. That’s beyond the scope of this article.
The key to searching Aeroplan is, ironically, not to rely on Aeroplan’s search engine to show you what’s available. Use the tools above to get you where you need to go.