rankourabu

noone knows, but you need to account for the ~$1000 surcharges on most Aeroplan tickets to Europe.

tcook052

Good question. On IHG when I've purchased points with a bonus promo it shows the regular and bonus amounts but don't know how points.com works so anyone have any insights.

canadiancow

The screen that gives you the price and mileage amount is the final purchase screen. Short of having you "hold" miles (like holding space on a flight) with the dropdown, there's no way to do that. With only 10M eligible for the top bonus, there are going to be a LOT of people there trying to buy.

20 people are able to buy the full 500k.

The bovine and I are each talking about buying the full amount. That would be 10% of the available bonus pool at 115%.

I don't think that's going to happen, but there's serious consideration.

Not that 1.1cpm is much worse than 1.0cpm, which means there's 110M available.

But I suspect you're going to have to make the purchase with no idea whether you're getting 115%, 90%, or 65%. I'd bet that if you do it by 1015 EDT, it'll be at least 90%. But I could see the 115% running out by 10:00:05.

Adam Smith

I hadn't realized they outsourced this function to points.com. I wonder why that is; I wouldn't have thought there was a lot of overhead in running one's own system for miles, or a lot of insight that points.com would provide.

I haven't looked at points.com in ages. Man, has it gotten sad! I remember ages ago being able to do cool things like convert HBC (the Bay) points in to Delta miles and stuff like that, with lots of different options. Now there seem to be way fewer options.

I'm just struggling to see why Aeroplan has turned this over, and is certainly paying some commission, when it doesn't seem all that difficult to mange in-house.

Adam Smith

I certainly hope that's not how they're going to run this. I'm interested at the 115% bonus level, but at 90% my interest drops off substantially, and at 65% it's zero. If they're not going to tell me what I'm getting for the money I'm paying (I'm not thinking of purchasing the maximum, but perhaps enough to get me a big chunk of the 250K for the 25K MM miles), I'm not going to give them anything at all.

Given your huge Aeroplan mileage balance, I'm surprised you're contemplating making such a large purchase though. Do you really have that much confidence in what those miles are going to be worth down the road?

canadiancow

I maintain a 12-18 month runway, funded primarily with EYW. I can't possibly see EYW happening this year, and given the ecological thread, I could easily see COVID stop them from running another one until we have a vaccine. And by then, maybe they'll have forgotten about it.

As for confidence in value... do I have confidence in what they will be worth? I have some confidence. I wouldn't pay 2cpm.

In fact, this discussion with you is making me think I should just buy the whole amount.

Norcanair

And the word from Twitter...

Adam Smith

Based on the rough numbers you threw out the other night, I thought you would be burning these miles more in the 18-24 month timeframe. To me, that's a long way away and a lot of risk to assume on a very substantial purchase like this. I also see correlation between lack of EYW and general lack of travel - if you're thinking that things will be so bad for a while that AC won't want to do an EYW, that will probably also mean your burn rate slows way down on the Aeroplan miles, further pushing out the amount of time it will take you to burn them.

I would see this as a somewhat risky investment then, and one with limited upside - points values tend to be like ratchets, only ever going one direction, so it's not like you're going to be able to redeem 80K points for a J round trip to Europe soon. If I'm going to gamble, I'd rather put it to work on a risky investment in the market that has a higher chance of paying off (maybe even AC stock! ) than airline miles.

Re running another EYW, you should just suggest that they run it all on DH3/DH1s so that your ecological consequences are positive instead of negative

canadiancow

An EYW payout, including the 1 million, plus all the points for the wings, plus the Aeroplan miles for actual flights, plus the SE bonus (~1.3M), lasts me less than 12 months. I've been pretty consistently burning through ~1.8M per year for the last few years. My current balance is in the 1.7 range, but I have, for example, a 2 pax SFO-TYO F round trip booked for later this year, so I'm counting that in my runway.

Flights may be reduced, but that doesn't mean I won't be picking up my typical travel schedule as soon as borders open. And I think the optics of doing EYW when there is still any kind of risk from COVID-19 is going to be problematic. I don't think they won't "want" to run it to encourage more travel, but if you thought "hey come burn fuel for fun" was bad, "hey come sit within 6 inches of a stranger" is going to be worse.

I can easily redeem my miles at 3-4 US cents per mile for trips I would actually otherwise pay for. So if we take the low end of that (3), and redemptions are devalued such that I need x times the current miles to redeem, then I need an investment that can do 3/x before I redeem this, which would likely be by the middle of 2022 at the latest.

I was going to say let's estimate x at an obnoxious value of 2, but I think that's too obnoxious, so let's go with 1.5. Does an investment exist that can do 200% in 2 years? Definitely. Can I find it more easily than I'm willing to bet on my travel picking up by then and x<=1.5? I'm not so sure about that. And I think x will be a fair bit less than 1.5.

Another thing I'm consider and worried about is come June when travel still hasn't picked up. Will there be another TAH promotion? Will there be another mileage sale? Will I have exhausted my 500k/year purchase limit?

RIGHT NOW, I am thinking I might pay for 250k, get the 90%/115% bonus, and then leave the rest for future possible promotions.

But I am (obviously) putting a lot of thought into this.

Flyingbunny88

need some advice, where can i see the 250k allowed points to be purchased per transaction and 500k total points allowed?

canadiancow

Practically speaking, you can't buy more than 250k: https://aeroplan.points.com/air-cana...plan/en-CA/buy

https://storefront.points.com/air-ca...and-conditions says:



and

nexusCFX

For reference, when Marriott has done bonus promos the bonus has been reflected on the Points.com purchase page. However, as you've pointed out, there's a very high chance that any number they show you there could invalidate during the seconds it takes to click the button to confirm the purchase, so I don't know what they'll do here.

Flyingbunny88

So just to be clear here, if we are purchasing 100k miles with $1000usd, we will be getting total of 215k miles (100k + 115k of the bonus) if we get lucky on getting the 115% promo. Can anyone confirm? Or, are we only getting the total of 115k miles instead?

canadiancow

They easy and customer-friendly solution would be that, if fewer than 10M have been purchased UPON PAGE LOAD, show and honor 115%.

This means they would give out more than 10M at 115%.

It's also possible they show an error if they've exceeded 10M, which is annoying, but still "legal".

Anything where you purchase without knowing, however, would likely result in chargebacks.

Needless to say, I'm refreshing until it says 115%, then buying.

100k miles cost $3000 CAD, ~$2136 USD. You will receive 215k miles, which is why everyone has been saying 1cpm (USD).

215k miles for $1000 USD is less than half a cent per mile.

Flyingbunny88

Thanks for clarifying, i just went thru the site and checked if i were to buy miles now and you’re correct.

imagine that a J Round trip to asia (2?) with potential multiple stopovers requires 155k miles, will ‘cost’ $2162.80 by purchasing just over 72k miles. Not bad i think for J with AC-SQ or AC-ANA or AC-TAG or EVA? Or, am I wrong?