Originally Posted by
agjil
All you need to do is transfer 50,000 American Express MR points to Aeroplan and you're set.
You don't need to spend a penny during the promotion period, although this is assuming you have an existing American Express card with at least a 50K MR points balance.
I guess I made a big assumption that most people who are in this hobby collect American Express MR points and usually have big points balances.
Yes, if flying, points collecting, etc is a hobby, it's easy for people to have 50K MR and transfer those over. But most people in the country are not hobbyists, have never churned credit cards, etc. They usually have a few different credit cards, which often include store-branded cards that came with some promotion (e.g. discount on first purchase, interest-free financing for first purchase, etc), but they have one or two primary cards and just use those for day-to-day spend, which is where their points balances primarily come from.
I'm sure there are a few hundred hobbyists, or maybe even a few thousand, who could easily transfer over 50K MR, but how many of them
will? P25K isn't exactly very valuable, and those folks tend to manage and value their points very carefully. If they were planning to book tickets through Aeroplan soon, sure, the added incentive might make it worthwhile to transfer over the points, but otherwise it's probably pretty marginal.