Originally Posted by
ridefar
You mean OW actually flies to Canada?
Let's do some math. If OW makes 8% of their seats available as rewards to AE members, and they have about 20,000 seats per year departing Canada (and none domestically), then how many AE points will those 1,600 seats cost, or how long (expressed in millenia) will the average AE member need to wait to be able to get a reward seat. (Somebody can probably point out that I am off by more than an order of magnitude on the number of OW seats departing Canada... But so what? As a percentage of *A seats they are such a trivial amount as to make the whole discussion laughably stupid. If I was a AE shareholder I would ask for the board to be replaced on the general grounds that they are clearly too dumb to tie their own shoe laces or even zip up on the way out the door in the morning, never mind run a business with a valuation of $250m or whatever the rapidly declining number is.
Who are the main OW players in Canada? BA, CX and AA. Which bank do they have existing relationships with? RBC. Which other airline does RBC have a relationship with? WestJet. Add WestJet and RBC to the mix and you have a potentially very powerful player in the points game in Canada. The Aimia Board may not be as dumb as you think.
That may be a stretch but it's not impossible. It would be better long term for consumers.
Then again, this OW story may just be a gimmick to get the AC consortium to up their price.