At the moment I see the banks (TD and CIBC) having the greatest concerns with the offer being rejected. If their contracts with AE require them to purchase a minimum number of miles each year, they need to retain clients for their AE cards. However, both banks have Visa cards that offer their own points programs and they could convince (through sign up bonuses) cardholders to move over to these products. But these programs are really of value when redeeming for economy flights as they basically only offer a points to dollar credit off regular airline fares, so buying premium flights would not be practical.

And this would be a major problem for the new AE since any airline partner with premium cabins would certainly not sell them award seats at the current mark-up of 30%-50% over basic economy awards. The most attractive members for such a program are those who ultimately want premium awards...and AC’s new program (Altitude 2.0) will be able to offer these at the same mark-up under the STAR partnership agreements.

And if AC’s elites are burning down their AE miles, then it would prove practical to start up Altitude 2.0 with a stash of redeemable miles by crediting these accounts with a comparable number of miles as they have as their AE balances as of July 2020. Given AC was prepared to take on $2 billion of liability from unused AE miles in the purchase offer, it could surely handle a similar number of “free” miles in its new program...say cover up to 200 billion miles. The biggest concern among Altitude elites (and others who may fly AC more than once a year but not achieve elite status) must be the prospect of having no redeemable miles in a new program for quite a while. AC must adopt some scheme to prime the pump so either crediting (up to a certain ceiling per account, say 100K) one’s AE balance or arbitrarily giving 25K miles to 25K elites, 35K to 35K elites, etc. Even with 1 million elites, that’s likely less than the afore noted 200 billion AE miles liability.

With a simple, uncomplicated FF program, AC should be able to license software from one of its STAR partners to create a platform, and ramp up space and staff at existing call centres to handle calls for less than the $350 million it was offering for AE. I suppose the biggest issue for AC will be having access to non-Altitude AE members, though which ever of the two banks come over, they’d bring their portion of that group.

I don’t believe a stand alone AE could survive after the transition period on AC awards ends. Air Miles has captured the country’s major grocery chains (Metro and Sobey’s/Safeway) and gas chain (Shell). Loblaws has added Shoppers Drugs and Esso to its Optimum program which leaves AE with two major consumer gaps for what will be a shopping loyalty program. Unless it buys Optimum or Canadian Tire’s Triangle (though the latter has no grocery partner) the odds of surviving against Air Miles is slim to none. AIMIA’s Board has let shareholders down by not taking the enhanced AC/banks offer along with the AeroMexico one, and folded up the company distributing the spoils to shareholders.

Good point about AC’s role as AE’s ticket issuer. But PD can’t issue tickets on other IATA carriers and is even limited on Jet Blue, it runs a closed system. AE would need to set itself up as a TA to even plate OW tickets.

TORONTO — Aimia Inc. says it has a new deal for Toronto-based Porter Airlines to become a preferred Canadian airline for the Aeroplan loyalty points program as of July 2020, when the current arrangement with Air Canada ends.

The announcement follows Aimia’s rejection of a bid for Aeroplan from an Air Canada-led group that includes the key Aeroplan credit card partners Toronto-Dominion Bank, Canadian I


I personaly think that this is not good news.