E35k access to unsold PE flights?
 

I'm considering buying 500,000 miles with the Aeroplan Buy Back deal in order to achieve E35k status (currently at E25k). The primary motivation would be to gain access to more market fare flights on the Aeroplan website as shown on the altitude status chart: ("Access to any unsold Economy Class seat on Air Canada flights").

Question: Do unsold Premium Economy flights show up or is it just unsold economy flights. Put another way, will there be access to more PE seats? All my flights are domestic long haul (YVR-YYZ).

Thanks.

A bit confused by your post. There is no Altitude benefit for market fare rewards.

Assuming you are wanting to access unsold seats at 2x the fixed-mileage reward, then AFAIK there is no benefit for PE, just regular economy.

Also, I'd question your strategy of buying miles to redeem for such flights - you won't earn AQM with those flights, and if you're flying anyways, you'd probably get enough miles to earn your status without the promo.

Sorry for the confusion. I'm looking for better access to 'Classic Reward' PE flights (I never use market rewards).

you only get the economy seats at 2X the fixed points value. only good if you fly high season and need to get some place and cash is too much.

Thanks. I didn't realize it was 2X the fixed points value. That defeats the purpose for me.

It can be useful in case of a last minute flight where the cost is quite high. I used it once around Christmas time from YWG - YYZ - YOW. I booked the day before the flight and then used eUpgrades to move up to J.

In my case it worked well but it has to be balanced with the actual cost of the flight.

And to be clear, no access to PE at those rates, even. Even SEs don't really get IKK for PE. AC doesn't really seem to have gotten its head around dealing with PE rewards, it's all a bit disorganized.

There is IKK for PY for SEs. And like Y, there's no externally visible fare class it maps to. Unlike J, there's no externally visible fare class that it highly correlates to.

I know it exists, yet I've seen it all of once or twice in my thousands of reward searches. I've seen many flights that have a bunch of space for sale in N, and where AC is happy to let me IKK a seat in J, but doesn't offer me PY. As far as I can tell, whatever AC is doing to determine availability of IKK for PY is resulting in almost none of it being offered. Which is why I said we don't really get it, rather than saying we don't get it :)