Originally Posted by
eigenvector
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.
I definitely agree with all that, but:
1. We know there are technical changes coming due to Amadeus
2. We can assume there's going to be an overhaul of other components of the system to relaunch under AC
3. They chose to use the word "temporary"
While obviously things can change, I have no doubt in my mind that their intent is for this to be temporary. Mark Nasr is a big fan of transparency (the announcement even mentions a 0.3% statistic, data that is completely unnecessary to share - it also mentions routing to Asia via Europe, which I'm surprised they'd be so willing to advertise), and I just can't see anyone under him putting out an intentionally false statement.
On another matter, I just realized SEs don't get the phone fee waived.
But we can book online for free, and then call for a free change.
