What is a route controller?
 

Pardon my ignorance, but I have seen this term in other postings, and I do not know the role of this person.

Can this person coordinate with an Aeroplan agent or a AC reservations agent to facilitate the process of getting for the customer award, or revenue seats, respectively?

The route controller determines what inventory is to be set at in the different classes of service. If they have 100 economy seats to work with, they will determine what numbers will be allotted towards each economy class of service will be made available (ie M, H, Q, L, W, etc). They are constantly monitoring flights for best revenue control and will change the number of seats available on any given aircraft to ensure it is getting the best revenue for AC.

What is the involvement of a route controller, when I call the Aeroplan agent, to try to get an award seat? - On some other postings, I have been told that sometimes, the Aeroplan agent has to go to the route controller to get a seat, which not be available on that Aeroplan agent's screen.

Thanks for the informative post CPYVR! Sounds like a challenging job! It would be interesting to see how they manage loads on Beech1900D!

As an E or SE, the reward seats that become available on sold out flights (no reward seats left), are converted from $$ revenue to reward revenue by the route controller.

Fly Boy, there is actually overlapping inventory, which makes the job easier. Every seat can be sold as a Y seat, if there are engough people who want to buy them

For example if there are 19 seats on the aircraft, if they are prepared to oversell to 23, and there are 21 tix sold, you may find the flight showing as:

Y2 M2 B2 H2 V2 Q2 L2 T2 N2 ....

There are not 18 seats left--when somebody buys one seat--in any class, all the numbers will drop. Similarly, they will not sell 2 Y
's and 2 M's.

When the Y figure is below 9, that is a pretty good indicator of the absolute number of economy reservations that remain available on the flight.

Question to CPYVR.

For E and SEs, the route controller can release economy revenue seats for awards, this can be done for business class seats only for SEs?

Does the route controller release the seats, or can the Aeroplan agent do it himself/herself? Or put it another way, if the Aeroplan agent sees in the screen that there are no award seats, is it possible that the Aeroplan agent may say nothing is available, without going to the route controller?

Finally, is there a route controller for Aeroplan awards on Star Alliance partner airlines?

I've never had an agent go to a route controller for an award seat--if there was J and the flight wasn't oversold, the agent could sell it to me for points.

The only time, as an SE, that route controllers got involved was for upgrades when C was sold out.

AC*SE is right... If D or W class is not available, the agent can simply take a revenue seat and convert it into award seat right away without going to anyone. {At least that's what the SE desk does}

AC*SE and Empress are indeed correct. As long as the flight is not oversold, the Aeroplan agent can take a Y or J seat (depending on status) and send it to the route controller for conversion to W or D class. No direct contact with the route controller is needed except for agents to send it to them for the actual conversion. And sorry Gold Flyer, but I know of no route controller for *A partners that I have access to.