swmb31

Trying to book a priority award in July yvr-ewr, dtw-yvr...
The priority rewards are only showing economy on the longer flights (e.g. yyz-yvr)...
Is this normal? I have not had problems getting business before...

Adam Smith

It's dependent on availability of R space, which is variable.

tomvancouver

Do you have the 100k SE priority option checked?
That will show your IKK options. It seems unusual that there is no YYZ-YVR R availability for over a month out. The odd widebody flight maybe, but there should be many R options daily.

ac777

It seems IKK is gradually going the way of the Dodo. I was trying to book a flight for my wife in November and although flights had lots of seats in Y and J IKK was not available--YVR-HKG/YVR-ICN/YVR-NRT for a lot of the dates. Ultimately the most helpful agent at Aeroplan did get a seat but she was also very frustrated that AC was not giving IKK this far out with so many empty seats.
I am now waiting for the dreaded enhancement next year where we will be told that in order to be fair IKK is being abolished.

Jumper Jack

Wait, I thought the whole point of AQD was to "Not cheapening the SE status"

LOL /S

YOWgary

Actually, I believe they felt the density was too high in the SE ranks.

Jumper Jack

Oh... well, without IKK
That would throw a wrench in my glorious plan to burn 350,000 pts next year.

YOWgary

There's lots you could do with 350,000 points, even if this year's flying leaves you short of SE.

You could try out the Dreamliner!

HerpaYvr

Change your date as I was doing the same thing for July.

I just moved my plans up by a day and I got the YVR-EWR in J

Adam Smith

Not sure I follow you. I just spent a few minutes searching. I was able to find X≥2 on most flights I looked at on those routes in November (4-5 random dates scattered through the month for each route). And with IKK, I was able to get ≥2 Y seats on any flight I looked at. So as far as Y IKK space goes, I'm seeing no issue whatsoever.

For J space, that's another matter. I did find a few flights with I1, but not sure I saw any with I2, and even with SE IKK, there were very few days where I could get 2 J seats. I looked up loads and most flights were P9 R0, so AC seems to be pretty stingy with R space on these routes. Perhaps someone who goes to Asia often (which I don't) could shed some light on that point.

That being said, ICN seems to have more R space than the others and I found quite a few flights that had R≥2.

By the way, searching for R space is a time where having an EF subscription comes in super-handy - far quicker to crunch through options than using the crappy Aeroplan website (X and I go through a different method, which isn't much quicker than the Aeroplan site). I could crunch through an entire month of flights on a route in <5 minutes.

Jumper Jack

Entire month?
I was only able to do a week at most, is there some secret? (+/- 3 Days)

I do find it extremely difficult to piece together a relatively good mini RTW without IKK... Though
Dreamliner is more like a "dream"... for me, I did saw one of two ICN-YYZ on a 787 and thats about it.

I guess the last straw is the SE YQ Wavier, once that's gone they might as well call it Super Scam

Adam Smith

@Jack: what's this about SE? Your Tango4Life philosophy isn't exactly compatible with accumulating 100K AQM / 95 AQS and $20K AQD...

I didn't say I could do it one search, I said I could do it in <5 minutes. Set up the search: YVR-HKG, depart date, return date, +/- 3 days on each, airline AC, exclude codeshares, direct/non-stop only, search.

That computes 7 days for you. A couple seconds to click through each and see the space. (If you want to speed that slightly, tell it to only show R class and then your eyes won't be distracted by other fare classes).

Hit refine search - no need to re-enter all the parameters, just change the date by 7 days - and you're off to the races again.

Jumper Jack

But someone in my family could hit 100KAQM/10K AQD

My Tango4Life philosophy is changing next year once I become E50K(gifted,obv) as the price difference between Tango and Flex is now minimal once you add in the Cost of PE seats on YVR-YYZ, a route which most of my flying is on...

Someday though.. I will be able to become Star G on my own... today is not that day (or the next 800 or so days ) - assuming SE is still worth something by then.

Adam Smith

In the time between posting that last post and writing this, I checked every YVR-HKG and HKG-YVR in November and R=0 everywhere. And wrote this post. In under 4 minutes.

Adam Smith

You do realise though that for international IKK, the SE has to be in the travelling party, right? So if some family member makes SE, you can fly around North America on SE IKK yourself, sure, but the international stuff requires them to be with you.

As for value of SE, they've implied they might even improve it for next year, so who knows.