Award seat availability for flight change
 

Hello, about 6mos ago I booked a nonstop flight from the US to Frankfurt to Lisbon on May 17th using Aeroplan points. I got a decent deal at 70k points in Business + $100 or so.

I'm hoping to change the second leg of my flight to a late departure to spend the day in Frankfurt. Air Canada says Yes there are 2 flights in the evening on Lufthansa and TAP Portugal, but Aeroplan has no award seat availability on those flights and that ticket alone is approaching $500.

When does this type of availability get opened? Any hope if I wait around it may become available?

I doubt that anyone can answer those questions for you, since the answers may depend on how fully booked the evening flights are. But have you checked with Aeroplan to ask if an Economy award seat is available on either of those flights? It might be worth relinquishing the Business seat for that segment of your trip if you really want to spend the day in Frankfurt (or Mainz, which is equidistant from FRA and more interesting, at least in my opinion).
Good luck with your travels!

Is it a one-way award? Is AC willing to let you re-book the ticket just to FRA? You will save some taxes with that as well. One-way FRA-LIS in coach on TAP should be cheap - with a planned long layover, just book that separate and slum the 2 hours in coach.
Will LH or TP open up I-class later? Maybe, maybe not. I’d not count on that tbh. If you really want that day in FRA I’d book that now.

Thanks guys.
It might be worth contacting Lufthansa directly to see if giving up Business for a Coach seat might be an option.

I already asked about canceling the 2nd leg and they said I'd get $50 back but I'd have to pay $100 to cancel so that makes no sense. I'm better off just not going to the 2nd leg. Problem is that the one-way to Lisbon is over $400.

What search engine(s) are you using? Maybe you accidentally selected a low value "dollar" as your currency?

I use Google Flights

Okay. How set are you those evening nonstop flights? Do any other cities work for you on the outbound? What about spending the night somewhere else during your transit?

My recent Aeroplan award experience is limited to a couple of tickets. In both situations, I needed to change flights and the award inventory opened up 1-2 weeks from to the flight date. Of course, as others have stated, it all depends on supply and demand so YMMV.

Have you looked into purchasing a round trip FRA-LIS to see if you get better pricing?

Or a routing with connection e.g. FRA-MUC-LIS? That’s was our award routing on the last trip..

LH is not going to very helpful here I'm afraid. As soon as the agent realises that this in an Aeroplan award ticket, you will be told to contact Aeroplan for any rebooking. LH is not going to touch reward tickets issued by others than LH M/M.

Buying o/w tickets with LH is always prohibitively expensive. Is is never half of the round trip fare.