Originally Posted by
canadiancow
Interesting attitude. The negative changes are called out as "temporary" for "system upgrades", and the fee waivers for SE are what certain members have always used to tout why UA is better.
As someone who's only used two stopovers once, and one of them was only 36 hours, I'm extremely pleased with these changes.
There's certainly some positive changes, but as someone who doesn't accumulate a huge amount of award miles I don't book a lot of award tickets - just high-value ones. To me, losing mini-RTW in J for 150K vs. saving $25 on refunding a ticket is more of a downgrade than an upgrade. This has long been one of the distinguishing features of the Aeroplan program.
As for the changes being temporary, we've all seen 'temporary IT issues' (e.g. phantom inventory, some carriers being blocked on AE) drag on for years without resolution. I'm not holding out much hope for the old stopover rules ever being restored - in the current Aeroplan program or in the coming Air Canada one. Aeroplan had, to my knowledge, the most generous stopover rules of any *A program, and all that has been committed to in this announcement is that there will be stopovers in some form in the new program.
I've personally never seen a "new, more flexible" FF program launch that wasn't just marketing speak for devaluation. Kudos to AC if they manage it but I'm not holding my breath.