raincity

Hi,

I'm looking for some tips for finding good flights when booking with aeroplan points. I have a lot of points primarily from credit card rewards, but little/no status points, as usually do just a couple trips a year.

In the last year or so, I've really struggled to find anything at all in terms of availability for first/business flights, especially on star alliance flights. I'm in Vancouver, and have even looked at doing seattle or sfo departures to london to get united, but aeroplan site always tries to force me on air canada and goes back to vancouver.

Early 09, I was able to get 4 first from yvr<->tlv via chicago and frankfurt on united first, but required automating searching a 30 day range on the aeroplan site. =) This year, nothing at all for a bunch of various yvr<->lhr or yvr<->cdg.

Does anyone have any tips on finding these flights, or ways to transfer the points to other star alliance airlines (not using points.com or some other insane transfer rate)?

Are there other ways to use the points besides on the aeroplan.com website? Or is availability really that scarce? I'm starting to move to spg instead which lets me transfer to any airline, but have a lot of aeroplan point accumulated.

Thanks for any insight/help!