YOWgary

​​​​​​That's a guess. We've certainly seen some examples of that, but very often with a 25,000-point flight at 8 AM, and a 95,000-point flight on an identical flight at 8:45.

​​​​​​...with all due respect, your predictions are consistently among the most pessimistic in this community in any given AC-related scenario.

Considering the new program has launched amid the biggest disruption to global air travel since the Wright Brothers, I don't believe enough reliable data exists to call this one in either direction yet, and I think any data of that type is a bare minimum of six months away.

Keep in mind as I say this that since November I've been flagging things like 4x cost discrepancies between identical flights 45 minutes apart, I'm by no means predicting everything's going to turn out sunshine and lollipops.

I just think you're trying to extrapolate from non-representative data, is all.

​​​​​

rankourabu

I hope you are right and that it will be sunshine and lolipops with AC dynamic pricing.
My experience trying to spend my SkyMiles leads me to believe the opposite.

boomerfss

Just booked 4 priority rewards from YKA-YYC-FRA-BCN and return from MAD-FRA-YYC-YKA. All business (I) class for about 60,000 points each plus $200 in fees/taxes per ticket. Pretty good deal I think. It's for next February but I can cancel if I need to.

Adam Smith

Welcome to FT

So, the tickets were about 120K round trip before the priority reward discount?

boomerfss

Thanks! Closing in on million mile status. Wish I'd signed up here a long time ago.

Just re-looked at the points and it came out to 76250 per ticket with the 50% discount. So they would have been 152,500 before the discount. Still a good deal I think.

Adam Smith

You're here now, which is what counts

The old rate for that would have been 110K. I would see a ~40% increase in the required points as not very good value, but to each his own

boomerfss

Yeah they sure jacked up the points. I was happy getting 4 seats in business. It's pods from YYC-FRA which is a 9 hour flight. I never used to be able to get these seats under the old plan. And the tickets are over 40,000 less per ticket than the old system even with the old priority rewards.

Adam Smith

Oh, this was 4 seats? Yes, those were hard to come by on YYC-FRA under the old program. Even as SE, not always easy. Give you have a priority reward that was good for international J, presumably you're SE, right?

Out of curiosity, did you only ever search for 4 seats? I'm curious whether the price would have been lower if you were only booking 1 or 2, and whether going up to 4 might have kicked it up a notch, price-wise.

boomerfss

Yup SE. Actually i had to be flexible on the day of departure to get the better point. 2 days later and the point requirement doubled.

Also, 2 of us are departing from YKA and my daughter and her boyfriend are departing from YYC. We'll all be together from YYC onward.

And also, my 2 tickets departing YKA were actually 135,700 and their 2 tickets were 173,900. So maybe the points went up as I booked our tickets first?

Adam Smith

Thanks for sharing all this data

Since you booked the tickets from 2 different origins, it's a bit less clear, but normally one wouldn't expect a YKA-MAD ticket to be much different in price from a YYC-MAD ticket, so it's likely that there were only 2 (or 3) seats at that lower price, and that by booking the first pair, the second pair got kicked in to the higher bucket. If you had tried to book all 4 tickets at once from either YYC or YKA, there's a good chance they all would have come at the higher price.

That's certainly how it would work for a revenue ticket, but we're still trying to figure out how this all works for the new points system.

Genouver

I'm learning the new AP booking system. So far I've observed the following:

1. The most complex bookings possible online are under multi-city which allows for no more than two legs.
2. There is no advanced search page to run narrow searches specifying airlines, airports, Y/J/F, travel times, etc.
3. There is no calendar view for availability, so if you have flexible dates in a particular month, you have to run a new search for each date of the month.

Is that right? Are there search engine alternatives either free or paid, beyond united.com?

Thx.

YOWgary

It would be more accurate to say that multi-city online search currently maxes out at two *one-way bounds*. For example, YOW-YYZ-YVR-NRT-SIN // HKT-AUH-ORD-YOW, is bookable as a multi-city on the website.

Genouver

Gary, thanks for the info. How would such a complex search be performed online? The closest I have come is to wait for the right routing to come up in AP's search results of available itineraries. So with your YOW-YYZ-YVR-NRT-SIN example, I would search YOW-YVR, and scan the AP search results until I find the desired routing via YYZ. Then, search YVR-SIN and again scan through the search results until I find the desired NRT routing.
Is that what you mean or is there another way?

YOWgary

To get the example I posted, YOW-YYZ-YVR-NRT-SIN // HKT-AUH-ORD-YOW, I plugged "YOW-SIN" and "HKT-YOW" into the search engine with sample dates, then scrolled down until I saw an itinerary that was sufficiently complicated to illustrate the point about "bounds" vs "legs".

The answer to the 'method' part of your question gets a bit more complicated - you can flummox nearly any airline's search function with the right combination of origin and destination, but generally speaking the new Aeroplan search function is massively less susceptible to this than the old one was.

What are you trying to find?

Also, are you the same person I was talking to on Reddit about this earlier today? (I'm flyermiles_dot_ca over there).

ac/elite

Not sure whether this is the right thread to post this in, but I'm pricing out an itinerary in business class with a stopover YVR-IST-TLV-YVR. If I book online, I can book a multi-city itinerary, YVR-IST TLV-YVR for 149,500 pts and then a OW IST-TLV for 15,000 pts, for a total of 164,500 pts. I thought I'd save points by calling an agent and having this booked as a roundtrip with stopover in IST, but they are quoting 169,500. I thought that the first agent must be doing something wrong, so I called back and had another agent price it out. Same thing, and that was after him talking to a supervisor. Guess I'll book it as two separate itineraries.