Originally Posted by
eggsbenedict
After a few years of using the ex-Europe Lat fares, my annual AC TATL ticket purchase is going on a plain old NA-EU-NA Lat B fare for 2025. Honestly it's been a bit of a relief not having to schedule two round trip flights across two trips. I buy these with a companion pass, so the price is now roughly $2800 per person instead of $1800. Still super good value to me given that I can effectively buy and fly whenever I want and it's fully refundable. Waiting for sales with restricted availability for Saver J fares is a chore. Also the extra $2000 paid goes 100% to my SQD rather than being spread across two people which is a little silver lining, as I'm generally short SQD anyway.
That is of course now the least bad way to use your companion pass.
Also precisely what AC wanted to happen, hence the changes they implemented. Let's be real, it was too good to be true. At the end of the day, these cheap latitude ex-Europe were meant for people in Europe who looked for flexibility, and likely driven by cometition with fares offered by other airlines. Upgradeability as we used was more like a loophole, which they finally closed.
May well be too that if people who used this would have been quiet instead of bragging about it on Flyertalk, AC would not have found out. Possible that I was one of them also... :-(