Plumber

I had this the other day...

YHZ-YYC =21K points in J
YYC-YOW =43K points in J

I went to book the multi-city and it came to 83K points.

So I went back and just booked 2x one ways for a total of 64K points.

martyYOW

I have yet to be able to book multi-city trip where the math is right. Sometimes it’s not even close. Unless using a priority reward I just book one-ways. I called in to book a multi-city with priority rewards and the agent seemed to be aware it was a common problem. To avoid the booking fee, she had me book the outbound online while she was on the phone and then she did a no fee change to add the return. This was 2 months ago. Disappointing this isn’t fixed yet.

Adam Smith

Has anyone been able to get these to price correctly on the phone, or is it the same problem? Trying to figure out whether it's a website issue or whatever lies behind the website. I suspect the latter, but this being AC..........

FFSaver

I called yesterday and got the same result. The agent quoted the more "expensive" amount. When I told her that I was getting a cheaper fare by pricing them separately, she suggested I go ahead and book them separately instead of looking into why it gives such weird behaviour.

On a separate note, my understanding from the conversation with 2 phone agents is that the price is more or less the SUM of the cost of all legs when trying to piece a trip together involving multiple legs with AC and partners manually (when the AC search tool doesn't give you the desired itinerary). Is this true?? Or did I just happened to speak to 2 less informed agents?

whitecastle

Hi all, booked an MLE-AUH in Y and AUH-IAD in Business on Etihad a few weeks back as a multi-city online fare as I wasn't able to get the agent to piece together two different fare classes over the phone. Not a big deal. I noticed that the MLE-AUH segment has business class availability now so I've called twice to reprice and upgrade but the agents haven't been able to do so as they claim its a married fare now and theres no more business availability from AUH-IAD. Is this correct or should I HUCA?

On another note, I'm considered breaking up my trip to spend two days in Dubai now that I see that there's no quarantine requirements if you take a taxi straight from AUH to Dubai upon arriving. Will Aeroplan be able to split up my trip so that I'm departing two days earlier on MLE-AUH with a two day stop over and I keep the same AUH-IAD flight in business? According to aeroplan.com there is Y availability on the MLE-AUH segment I would want to change to. Thanks!

lsquare

I've been waiting for this to launch as well. Really excited! What's the expected date with Aeroplan in J?

lsquare

You got a particular itinerary in mind?

kalderlake

I've been hoping to visit Sri Lanka for the past two years, with a stopover in IST. I had to cancel the first trip scheduled for last May, and I'm guessing I'll have to cancel the second I have scheduled for this fall. So I'm working on another for next spring to CMB with stopovers in IST and TYO and sub-24-hour layovers in LXR, CAI, HKG and PVG.

At this point I'm hoping for something like: YVR-IST-LXR-CAI-AUH-CMB, pay cash for a flight from there to SIN, then continuing east SIN-BKK-HKG-TPE-PVG-TYO-YVR.

I have no idea if these routings are possible now under the new rules. I can't travel til April, so I'm waiting to book until those flights open up.

MillennialMiles

Another highlight from a livestream with Mark Nasr and Scott O'Leary on Points, Miles and Bling: Apologized for eStore rollout. Something to do with selecting RewardsOps as the provider since they charged a low rate and they could deliver a higher "earn" rate for members.

Things they're fixing: much faster crediting, actually get the credits, faster access to eStore ( aeroplan.com/estore works again!) UberEats seems to have been resonating well with the members and are working on fixing the issues with points not crediting via the app.

Mike Nasr's favourite charity: Miles for Migrants. Says thank you and says Aeroplan members were most generous in NA of all FFPs during last year's Travel at Home Donation.

Stay tuned for for Travel at Home 2.0

Scott O'Leary: AC will honour Buddy Pass conversions to 30k pts for CC apps made before April 30, even if the Pass takes a few months to show up.

Mark Nasr: Says there is tremendous value in the Buddy Pass and most people are missing the big picture.

YOWgary

Also relevant from today's event:

Calendar Search:
On the topic of when we'll see a calendar-search function, it sounds like the calendar function is in its testing phase now, aiming to take Version 1 online sometime in Q2, where the calendar shows a 7-day view with the lowest price available, period. Version 2 will add the ability to filter by cabin, like "show me the cheapest business seat in this 7-day range" and will arrive later in the year.

Digging deeper: Amadeus (AC's provider) provides better-quality availability data, but the tradeoff is decreased speed per search, and this effect amplifies when searching multiple dates. Mark Nasr says his team's working with Amadeus to find the best match point between search results that don't show false negatives or phantom space, and searches that don't take 30 seconds to execute.

Multi City bookings online:
They plan to "phase in" what they're calling 'expert routing functions', including the ability to book stop-overs online. The timeline Nasr gave was "this year", but it's apparently the feature for which they're getting the highest volume of calls. Looks like full functionality for custom stopover routings is probably a Q1 2022 ETA.

Tiered discounts for elite flyers and premium-credit-card holders:
Scott O'Leary mentions that they're very much still tuning these algorithms "based on who you are as a customer" and notes that there isn't currently a lot of differentiation between all the different permutations of high-engagement customer.

O'Leary mentioned that they want this to take greater shape over the course of 2021, and Nasr noted that there *will* be a differentiation in discount based on the tier of card you hold, but that card tier, amount spent and elite status will each be factors that determine overall discount.

On eUpgrade rollovers:
"If you applied for a premium card between Jan 1-Mar 31 this year, and we didn't roll your eUpgrades over, we'd be happy to take care of that on a one-off basis."

On the new 30-day limit on stopovers:
Reviewing several years of data in the previous program, "much under 1%" of all customers were booking with stop-overs of longer than 30 days, while a substantial portion of the user base was asking for the ability to book stop-overs on one-way tickets.

The 30-day limit was chosen as a compromise that would allow most customers to keep using the stopover feature, without creating a system that would allow abuse in the form of people booking something like HKG-YVR to get home from their vacation, paying 5,000 points for a "stopover", and adding an unrelated YVR-YYC business trip, 6 months later, into the same ticket. Example given is mine.

On airline partnerships:
Nasr says they started with a list of 180 airlines, whittled that down to which ones seemed like possible, mutually beneficial relationships, then whittled that down to which partnerships Star Alliance was likely to approve. Apparently there are more partnerships currently "in testing" and coming soon, including "broader travel partnerships outside of airlines".

On lounge reopening:
Nasr says they're willing to reopen any currently-closed MLL before it's profitable to do so, but the two metrics they're using are "how many eligible passengers pass through each day" and "what are the local restrictions", for example he notes that Montreal rules may prohibit them from serving food or drinks.

I was interested to hear them talk about how deeply they're tracking passenger-behaviour metrics at the airport, specific to Signature Suite access, and apparently their data shows SS-eligible passengers checking in substantially earlier once the Suites opened. The other side of this coin is that they're tracking those metrics to monitor whether they're giving too many people access through things like Flex-J award tickets.

On award pricing beyond published ranges:
You know what, I was going to write up a recap of this part, but based on the level of intense scrutiny this topic gets in this forum, I'd really advise anyone with an interest in this subject should go and watch the few minutes spent discussing the award chart, dynamic pricing etc. - in the Facebook Video link below, the relevant conversation starts at the 1h33m00s mark and runs to about 1h44m.

Dang it - Facebook dot com SLASH pointsmilesandbling SLASH videos SLASH 490692978738042

MillennialMiles

Guess the learning lesson for me is to take more detailed notes next time as it seems quite a few folks like the depth of @YOWgary response.

I do recall Scott O'Leary mentioning something about Premium CC holders that put a lot of spend of their co-brand and are elite Aeroplan members will see up to 50% discount of the dynamic AC flights eventually.

canadiancow

Here's my take on the meeting (https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=490692978738042)

Mark mentioned that the 75K tier has fewer members than any other tier. That makes sense to me, since as you go up, I'd naturally expect fewer, but since there's no cap to the SE range (i.e. 500k SQM is still just SE), it would have more people.

Calendar search is being actively worked on. They want to have the best award search out there. They're still working on performance and other search factors. Amadeus is much slower than ITA, so they're struggling to make the calendar actually reflect what would happen when you search just that day for availability and price. So they basically need to do the full search for each day to show the calendar. AC's search is deeper than any other Amadeus customer. Amadeus had to redevelop the entire calendar product for AC. The calendar is currently in UAT, and will "certainly" be rolled out in Q2, and their current target is in a few weeks, but they're not committing to that yet. Version one will show +/- 3 days, and will only show cheapest price on that day with no cabin filtering. Version 2 will allow selecting the cabin. In the future, they want to expand it somewhere between a 2 week and 2 month view. The also want to add filtering for number of stops, connection points, maybe airline. But they will do iterative development once it launches.

Version 1 sounds basically useless for anyone who cares about premium cabins, but it seems like this is something they really care about.

They're going to phase in "expert routing functions". The most requested feature is stopovers, and that will be added "this year". That will take care of the vast majority of people calling in for bookings that can't be done online. "Fully custom routing" will hopefully launch in Q1 2022. It's a lower priority than many other things they're working on.

They're going to discuss waiving the phone booking fee (maybe other fees?) for the "senior tiers" or premium credit card holders.

They're going to add an online change functionality for redemptions, rather than just the online booking and cancellation. But it's a very complex feature, and will need a good user experience.

They're trying to improve the experience with the contact center, such as better training for stopovers, which some agents seem to struggle with.

They're still working on a greater differentiation of redemption discounts based on your engagement with Aeroplan and engagement with your credit card. They're targeting 2021. Scott explicitly mentioned a double-digit percentage discount for premium credit cards.

The credit card rollover cutoff was December 31, and it will continue to be. They're trying to fix it for people who applied by March 31, but you can call in now to get them to do it.

If they were to add a new regional partner like PAL, they would really want an Aeroplan integration as well.

I'm not going to discuss much about the eStore since MillennialMiles already did, but they did say it was the thing they were least proud of. They want real-time crediting of points though.

They're working on more airline partners, but nothing specific to announce. Some are in the final stages of testing, so will likely be coming soon.

They're working on better hotel partnerships, especially when it comes to redeeming Aeroplan for hotels. Maybe some kind of status mapping (like the Marriott/United relationship).

Expect more everyday partners with Starbucks-like integration in 2021/2022.

They discussed award pricing falling well outside the published ranges, citing YVR-YYZ. They said they pay close attention when this happens. Mark apologized for a comment about published ranges. The clarified statement is that historically in 2019, 80% of the redemptions would fall in the published range... Well no crap. When X was the only available booking class, it's obviously going to be within the range

For converting a Buddy Pass to points, it seems like they'll let you do that as long as you applied for the card before April 30. Time of request for the conversion won't matter.

I still have 50 minutes to watch, but I need to switch over to the virtual do.

Edit: I guess YOWgary beat me to it. I'll only post anything else that's different from his content.

lsquare

That would be awesome. I only have UA Silver thanks to my Marriott Titanium status. Maybe AC can negotiate something like Platinum status for SE100k?

YOWgary

This never struck me as a competitive sport, the more we all share the more information everyone has to work with. Plus, you, Cow and I each covered different topics.

I heard "double digits" but I don't recall hearing anything like 50%. I would be absolutely stunned to see them give out a constant discount of equivalent value to Priority Rewards, given that they've just nerfed the IKK benefit for Super Elites. Even if it was only made available to end-of-the-bell-curve credit-card spenders.

canadiancow

It sounds like the US credit card might be interesting. They recognize that they're a foreign airline card in the most competitive credit card market in the world, so they will be competitive.

Seems like VIPs have SS access.

Nothing else that wasn't covered.