Adam Smith

WIKIPOST CREATED (December 11, 2016)

Scroll up to wiki for latest versions.

NEW VERSION UPLOADED (November 11, 2016)

I've uploaded a new version of the calculator that's substantially better. Details and new links in this post.



Original post:

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Given AC's unwillingness or inability to provide AQM and AQD before booking (or any time before having flown the itinerary), I thought it might be useful to have an ability to forecast these things.

A few years ago, some FTers built an Excel database containing the Aeroplan-credited mileage between numerous AC/*A destinations (see this thread).

I decided to expand on that idea, and that database, to build something more user-friendly and with more functionality.

This spreadsheet ([old link deleted]) will, with just a couple of inputs, calculate AQM, Aeroplan miles and AQD for a wide variety of routings that you feed it. (For those who would prefer to download the Excel version rather than access the Google Sheets version, use [old link deleted]).

New features relative to the previous data table:

• Calculator function which will give you both AQM and Aeroplan miles for one or multiple flights (up to 15 on a single itinerary). Unless you're adding or correcting data, there's no longer any need to scroll through the table itself.
• No longer requires entering data in both halves of the table - enter once and it's automatically mirrored.

There are a lot of routes for which we don't have data or that were subject to the old 500-mile minimum and now need updating. I may also have inadvertently killed some data that was only in one half of the previous spreadsheet (a lot of people weren't matching their columns and rows properly and putting data in the wrong cells). Please feel free to fill things in, the more people contributing, the more this becomes an accurate and reliable resource.

There are some detailed instructions in the spreadsheet to hopefully keep this a clean and useful resource, so please follow them.

If you would like to contribute data but don't feel comfortable editing the spreadsheet yourself, or don't have time, or whatever, feel free to post mileages in this thread and I or someone else will update the spreadsheet.

I hope this will be helpful. Thoughts and feedback appreciated.

P.S. Google Sheets sucks. This file was built in Excel and I've had to spend a bunch of time trying to get it back to work out some of the kinks for using it in Sheets. The one thing I haven't gotten rid of is the #REF error in the Aeroplan Distance column, which makes absolutely no sense. The file is much easier to use in Excel, so feel free to download it and then upload a new version.

Jumper Jack

Just some feedback on the actual calculator, maybe have the AQD input field actually built into each flight segment

Adam Smith

The purpose of the calculator is to allocate the AQD between segments of a multi-segment itinerary paid all at once (which I think is more of a problem for people than allocating AQD on one-segment tickets), which means you should only input it once, which is how it's built now.

This isn't meant as a running tally for all of your future flying, it's a tool to estimate mileage and AQD from a given itinerary. If you want to calculate the AQD for multiple itineraries, just run through the calculator multiple times.

24left

1. Outstanding effort and thank you adam.smith ! ^

2. "Given AC's unwillingness or inability to provide AQM and AQD before booking..."

.

Adam Smith

I've just thought of an issue. My formula allocates AQD based on the distances credited by Aeroplan. This shouldn't make a meaningful difference for most itineraries, even if the mileage AC uses for that purpose is slightly different, but there could be some distortion for itineraries with flights <250 miles, since AC presumably uses actual distance for splitting AQD, rather than the 250-mile minimum.

Problems for solving this are:

• We don't know the actual distance AC uses for these (although we can get a close approximation).
• Even if we did, off the top of my head, it would require essentially duplicating the table and the formulae, which seems extremely inefficient for something that's a pretty minor issue.

Unless someone else has a bright idea, it may not be worth putting a lot of effort into dealing with this issue given how few itineraries it should affect.

Thanks!

KenHamer

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9780; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.8+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.666 Mobile Safari/534.8+)

Typo?

"This shouldn't make a meaningful difference?

KenHamer

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9780; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.8+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.666 Mobile Safari/534.8+)

Someone forgot to add "or both".

Nevertheless, an excellent resource!

24left

(bolding mine)


Meanwhile.....in "post-game" adventures, where AC cannot even manage to post a flight on their own ticket and their own metal......

Adam Smith

Yes, thanks, I fixed it.

DNAwizard

Wow thank you adam.smith for creating this. Great resource for sure ^

Adam Smith

Link to Excel version added (up in the original post) for those who prefer to use that version (Google Sheets messes some stuff up).

canolakid

thanks for the effort! this is what makes FT a community.

ffsim

Awesome spreadsheet, thanks so much!

Mauricio23

Thanks! (And nice mention in The Globe and Mail today).

ffsim

I dunno, our Mr. Smith flies far, far more than the dude they mentioned in the article