What other options are there?
 

We've been Aeroplan members for years, and redeemed points for flights a number of times, never for hotels, car rentals, or any other items that appear in the aeroplan store. Most of my points have been accumulated through credit card purchases. I've begun to question how well this program is working for us lately, but don't know any alternatives.
I'd appreciate comments on any other points program(s) that could be used in a similar way. Thank you.

Banks have travel cards that give you cash refunds for travel spending of any sort (I use TD's). I get AP miles when I travel because that's what they give you for travelling on AC but the advantages of AP have disappeared with increased charges and extra miles required due to more and more AP sources chasing inflated priced seats. It used to be that AP gave great flexibility and predictable costs. No more. AP is becoming a deflated currency.

To my mind the main question is how much do you fly today on non-rewards, miles-earning airline tickets on Air Canada and AC partners? If you do this regularly it makes sense to stick with an Aeroplan-affiliated card as all the miles go into one 'bucket' - The miles earned from flying, and the miles earned from the loyalty card.

If you don't earn miles from flying, or fly regularly on non-partner airlines like Alaska or BA or whatever then you can basically choose whatever you'd like, i.e. Avion, Airmiles etc. because there's still only one bucket of miles.

The wife and I have also been generally assessing the value of Aeroplan as our main loyalty program for about a year now. Here are our thoughts which may include some incorrect assumptions which I welcome people to correct...

We're in a similar situation where we I get most of my points through credit card purchases nowadays also with the odd business flight thrown in here and there. Most of our vacation travel is not on AC though potentially on a Star Alliance partner in a blue moon. We only use our AP points for flights and not other types of redemption.

We're generally value travelers and are willing to fly out of Bellingham and Seattle if it makes sense. I mention that because we think economy seat flights can be very inexpensive. We don't have kids so we can also fly during offpeak cheaper periods. And as such, we don't think it's worth accumulating 15000pts and thus spending $15000 to get a free short haul economy flight (for simple comparison) based mainly on accumulation on Credit Cards (generally speaking since you do get free points upon signup, some 1.5pt:$1 ratios etc).

We even have to spend more because we're on the CIBC AP classic with 0.5:$1 ratio. Based on our spending and travel habits, we find it better value to go with this $35 card (with free supplementary) vs a $120 card (with $50 supplementary).

The points needed to accumulate an AP reward flight overseas is way high personally speaking and we'd rather take a LCC to Europe or an Asian airline to Asia anyways. So, when we use AP points to fly, it's been for the furthest we can go in North America which is Florida. As mentioned, we can get cheap flights out of Seattle so again, to make the redemption worth our while, the reward flight has to be in Business Class.

From an alternative CC perspective, one can do Avion but again, the yearly and additional card fees are high IMO but within spec ($120 + $50). I don't think you can use the points to book a biz class flight and there is a max price for the ticket (even tho the Avion reward is good for any airline, no blackout, and has no seat restriction).

If you think about it, most CC's give some kind of reward be it flight points, free insurance, cash back, lower interest rates, etc probably at a relatively similar rate of return. So it really a matter of person preference which reward type you'll get the most value and are actually going to use.

The AP point expiry parameters kind of put us in a pickle (which is obviously what they want to do) because we don't want our points to expire. Because we do take the odd business trip, we like the concept of a "flight reward treat" every so often, and there aren't a lot of other CC reward programs that interest us, we're still sloshing away with AP and our AP CC's. But we're seriously considering a dividend/cashback card.