zhaolei9888

many thanks guys. I mainly fly from YYZ to US and Asia. I guess AA is better?

nabeelj

YYZ to US - in some cases, Avios is better. Shorthaul awards at 4,500-10,000 Avios per segment, no close-in booking fees, $40 cancellation fees (in some cases, much less), random Priority AAccess.

yerffej201

i did, but i downgraded the cc acc's i control to the signature (non transferrable) one. I'm waiting to upgrade back to avion, and if i see other people getting first year waived, i'm just going to wait and see if i get one.
i'm perfectly fine with ap too haha

and yes, ba can book when schedule opens, aa can only book 330 days out.

plsavaria

So they ''really can't'' transfer the points without 250 eligible points. They didn't seem to care that it's not mentioned on points.com
Over the phon, they said that even non-esso gift card wouldn't qualify.

Now I'm stuck witk 23k essoextra points that I needed transfered to Avion for a christmas flight back home. There's just no way I'll use $250 of diesel before december.

At least, if they would have said that gift-cards worked, I could have used these.

nabeelj

I highly doubt Esso Extra distinguishes between points earned for eligible in-station purchases. I'd suggest buying $250 of third party GCs and am pretty confident that would do the trick.

EDIT: Even the Program Rules only say eligible purchases of $250, not gasoline purchases of $250. Eligible purchases for Esso Extra points include everything sold in-station except Esso GCs and a few other items (alcohol, tobacco, etc.).

bennyblanco

Frustrating, huh? I had to transfer 100,000 points over the past few days and after speaking with 2-3 different people at Esso who gave me 2-3 different answers, I finally asked them to escalate it to a supervisor who did the transfer. It's obvious to me that their phone staff are not very well trained with the programs rules, etc.

Also, based on what other people here are saying, you CAN buy NON-Esso gift cards and they do cound toward your 250 "purchase points"

plsavaria

Just spend 10 minutes with a supervisor who said there was no way to work around it, no way to change numbers in their system. (I called bull, saying they have to be able to update numbers for missed transactions, for example).

I'll try with a $50 gift card first. If it registers, I'll continue with that. If it doesn't, I'll have friends swap my point card with their gas purchase.

What we wouldn't do to save 700$ on an inflated christmas flight!

sadiqhassan

I am interested in this too. BA is great but I often find myself short of *A miles when I want to redeem on routes like YYZ-SFO/LAX/SEA. On routes like these, I have found AC to have excellent last minute availability (and if not on AC then on US or UA) while it is much harder to get seats on OW carriers. I also have the Avion CC so I have ended up with lots of BA EC miles and not enough aeroplan miles.

alc

Is this 250 requirement for going from Aeroplan to ESSO? Thought it was from ESSO to RBC rewards or HBC rewards.. where it doesn't go thru points.com

I just transferred 100K from each of my family members' account (Wife, Kid, myself) to our combine ESSO account. Took 3-4 days to complete. Now waiting for the 4 or 5 ESSO to RBC Rewards transfers that I submitted to complete. So far no issue... yet. fingers-crossed.

bennyblanco

I was told specifically twice by the same person that the 250 purchase points were NOT required.

That's why when it comes to stuff like this, ALWAYS get an employee name and/or number so that you can reference them later.

That's exactly what I did and the supervisor pushed the points.

alc

So I got the points on RBC.. so that took 2 days for me. So within 1 week, I got all 300K Aeroplan miles from 3 accounts to a single RBC account... Now, on to AA.

vernonc

How much did that net you in RBC points? And are these Avion points that you can redeem online with RBC example 45K points for the Carribbean?

mkjr

yes. or you can convert to CX, BA or AA.

alc

I went from 300K Aeroplan + 4480 HBC Rewards + some existing ESSO points to 208,500 RBC Rewards. And I just submited to AA. With the 20% bonus, I am expecting to get 250200 AA points in total. Planning to book 3 x YYZ-HKG in Y on CX, so that will use up 210K (if I read the reward chart correctly)

Here is the detail calculation for those who want to know:

50,000 Aeroplan = 56,929 ESSO per transfer on Points.com
hence 300,000 Aeroplan = 341,574 ESSO
4480 HBC = 4000 ESSO
Total ESSO now is 346,054

@ 2500 ESSO to 1500 RBC, I transfered 347,500 ESSO for 208,500 RBC

I will transfer another 300K Aeroplan in the new year and leave them in RBC rewards points, then wait for a transfer promo again to get them in AA account again.

1 Aeroplan end up = 0.8197776 AA.

Hence, I am really using 85389.01282494179 Aeroplan for my CX flight to HKG. ~10K more, but I expect less surcharges. Aeroplan normally charge $350 to $400 for AC15/16 rt. Using my usual $0.01 per AP miles, unless AA charge me more than $250 - $300, I am still cheaper this way.

Forgot to mention that I only did this because I got a mail-in offer for 1st fee wavied Avion card. So I need to take full advantage of the next 12 months.

yerffej201

That's actually a very fair conversion.