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 :)

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.

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.

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?

Thanks for sharing all this data :tu:

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.

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.

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.

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?

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).

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.

I haven't checked distance flown against the award chart, but are you accounting for the 5,000-point cost for the stopover at IST? If you want that stop to be >24h, you'll encounter that cost whether you book one-way or return.

I haven’t spent the time I guess to fully understand the new pricing, but I thought it would have been cheaper to book it on one ticket with the stopover would have been fewer points than booking it as two itineraries, especially with what I understood to be 5000 points only for a stopover. My thinking was that since I was essentially paying 15,000 points for a stopover, I would save 10,000 points by putting it all on the one itinerary. I clearly have more to do to understand how it works.

In general you're correct, but there may be instances where A-B + B-C is cheaper than A-B-C with (or even without) a stopover.

It would be pretty easy to run the math.

Noticed something similar the other day for a one way in Sept.

YVR/FRA/ATH - AC J, LH Y - 124.6k
YVR/FRA/ATH - AC Y, A3 J - 85k
YVR/FRA/SKG - AC J, LH Y - 126.3k
YVR/FRA/SKG - AC Y, A3 J - 70k
YVR/FRA/RHO - AC J, A3 Y - 122.7k
YVR/FRA/IST - AC leg Y, 2nd leg TK J - 85k
YVR/FRA/IST - AC leg J, 2nd leg LH Y - 94.3k (!)

YVR/FRA - in J - 156.4k

The whole thing is a mess. If the leg is available in J, why are certain carrier combos triggering it to move into Y. And that 2nd IST option…

Dynamic pricing out in full force for the summer

Domestic flights are selling for $100-$115 all in (desperation/competition?). Some routes are as low as 3.5k points + tax. Dynamic valuation of 1.5-1.8cpm

It is COMPETITION.

Well, sort of.

Maybe half a dozen routes are selling at that rate, for example I can get YOW-YVR for $125 one-way if I book three weeks out, but if I want to get on that very same flight, but tack a 12-minute hop to Nanaimo onto the end, that'll run me $567.

​​​​​​YYZ-YVR is dirt cheap all summer, which might be about competition, or it might be about the fact that a route that used to do thirteen directs a day is currently doing four, and they're trying to coax vaccinated travellers back onto airplanes. Then again, YYZ-YVR tomorrow will run you $870 one-way, when they know anyone buying a ticket probably *has* to travel.

Or maybe I'm wrong, and those $59 Flair fares are about to revolutionize the Canadian airline industry.