I haven't booked my family an Aeroplan reward for a while, as we've been enjoying rewards bookings with Avios and flying from US destinations and only paying low taxes. My spouse has accumulated quite a few Aeroplans through business travel and we want to use them to fly the family somewhere fun for vacation (we only have enough for the 4 of us to fly Y to a destination in Canada or the continental US). Y is not always the best use of Aeroplans, considering the scamcharges and taxes, but it saves us money for a vacation, so we figure we'll just use them.

Is there any way you can book an Aeroplan reward from a US origin? I recall not being able to do this online when I tried a couple of years ago booking a reward to Florida...could only leave from Canada. I want to keep the taxes/scamcharges down, and there seems to be no way of doing this by flying from YVR. For example, when I looked up 4 tickets to LGA from YVR, total taxes/fees for the 4 of us were over $700!!! It was a bit less flying to HPN (since United flights came up, instead of AC). It seems like such a rip-off, considering our last few vacations we've flown out of BLI and paid only $5 in taxes per ticket (using Avios on AS).

Perhaps we should save the Aeroplans for single Y or J rewards, just to just make them more worthwhile? I've done this in the past, but we tend to have less need for individual tickets these days, and more need for 4 tickets together for family vacations.

Any suggestions for Aeroplan rewards for Canada/US?