Is this not also contradictory?

If you qualify for E50 status you get *A Gold.

Or are you saying you want to get to 1MM so you get E50 for life and get *A Gold for life without having to ever fly AC again?

300k sounds like a lot of miles to fly on an Airline that you don't seem to like very much...is there no way to get *A Gold on one you like better?

That's not the purpose of the program.

The purpose is to get more of your money.

If giving you status isn't going to change your behavior in a way beneficial to AC, you don't "deserve" it.

Semantics. You never "deserve it. It's just a carrot.

If I don't like what happens, instead of going for 3MM, Ill move my business to AF/KLM/WS. Not that I really want to, but given how AC has thrown us in Calgary under the bus, we'll haveto see what they "deserve." :-)

I mean "deserve" from their perspective. They don't run the loyalty program to be nice. They run it because they think it will make them more money than not running it.

And in that context, status is very different from points. If the only thing that changes from giving someone status is they stop collecting bag fees, that's not what they want. They want you to pick AC over a competitor because you won't have to pay the bag fee.

But just like anything else in the world if you just optimize for short term money you might not like the long term results.

Unless AC want to give up the airline and turn into a credit card company I need benefits that make me want to fly. If they turn Aeroplan into a CC benefit program they might not like the long term results. Or maybe they will and I won't.

I was somewhat on the fence about manufacturing an extra $2,500 in SQD this year to hit SE plus earn a banked year (which would give me three in the bank). But this news/rumor makes it easier to decide: I’ll bump a couple of Y flights to J and secure that extra banked year. My guess is AC will “enhance” away some of the parts of the program that I appreciate most while also putting SE out of reach in future years. This way I won’t have to think much about it until 2030.

I've taken the stance that I will assume it will be a BA-level disaster, so I can not possibly be disappointed with whatever it actually ends up being.

Part of me wonders if I can organically get another 110k sqm this year to earn the banked year, but I doubt it.

But then, I�ve been around long enough to remember when 35,000 sqm got you *Gold, which also got you 3x 32kg bags pretty much on any Star Alliance partner n

(I'm responding here to the theme of a few recent posts touching on benefits for CC holders, but just quoting this one for brevity)

I'll make a couple of observations about the upcoming changes that are purely personal opinions and not based on any of the things I heard that led me to create this thread:

• I do expect them to make the program somewhat more favourable towards CC spend than currently, just because that's the way the industry is going, and CCs do make a lot of money
• The US credit card market is much more lucrative than the Canadian one. A few years ago, I spent some time working in the CC business. Some people who had spent a lot more time on that business than me indicated that an average dollar spent on a credit card was about twice as profitable for the issuer as one in Canada, due primarily to higher interchange (swipe/transaction fees) and higher revolve rates (percentage of customers carrying a balance and paying interest), without significantly higher overall loss rates - for some reason, I was told, a higher proportion of creditworthy Americans who do eventually pay you back still carry a balance
• The amount that AC wants to incentivize CC spending is dependent on the amount of money it can capture from that spending, which is only a piece of what the card issuer can generate to begin with. So I don't think we'll see as extreme bias towards CC spending as, say, when AA revamped their program

Lastly, I'll note that AC/Aeroplan is the absolute ironclad proof that the concept of loyalty programs holding significant value outside of an airline is garbage. Aeroplan's stock tanked when AC said they were going to walk away, because coalition loyalty programs have very little draw. People love airline credit cards because travel is aspirational and thinking about it is fun; the process of flying is also often miserable, so promising people a better experience when they do fly is very attractive. With points being devalued, airline lounges ever more crowded, and so on, we may be testing the limits of how far airlines can go before people decide they're not getting value out of their expensive airline rewards cards, but it's quite clear that without an airline, loyalty programs are nowhere near as attractive.

This sounds a lot like the BA de-evaluation announced earlier this year with Tier Points re-purposed and based for April 2025-March 2026 on money spent. No more miles based, and for the likes of my BA silver exec club - priority checkin, boarding, 2 bags, lounge, seats reserved at time of booking - now out of reach! 2 or 3 YYZ to LHR in PE, with voluntary upgrades to Biz for between 499 and 999 pounds which includes Biz tier points and some AA Canada to US flights thrown in was worth the extra spend. One needed 600 TP with PE at 90 points and Biz = 140 points. So 2 x PE returns all upgraded plus a couple of AA returns got me sillver. I think the timing is to follow others, and offer us an impossible choice - ditch BA status and chase AC status which I did and is now in question, or wait and see with AC. Its now coincidence that AC are following others and re-levelling the playing field. But we lose out regardless.
I guess it depends on how you measure loyalty - then pick your poison.

And this is the crux of my point. I earn my status by flying and I want to be able to use the benefits of that status when flying - especially when a lot of my travel is OPM and not to places and at times of my choosing.

If AC leans too hard in the CC direction where I'm expected to manufacture spend on a CC in order to get benefits that I need when I am flying, or if they further their existing tragedy of the commons scenario where I'm left to fight over benefits scraps with a bunch of CC holders ... then their program isn't going to drive more loyalty and money from me. And maybe they'll make enough from CC holders they won't care that I am flying YOW-CDG-X or YOW-ORD-X instead of YOW-YYZ-X sometimes, which is entirely fine.

Anyway, I guess we will see, but for a long time we've known what "enhancements" have meant from AC - devaluation for people who actually fly their product. I don't expect this to be any different, and it has probably been a long time coming.

I did some rough calculations to see what the CC spend requirements are at the current earning levels among the "big 4" legacy NA airlines. I used a scenario of someone who currently qualifies for 50K or the equivalent tier organically and wants to spend on a premium CC to get them to the top tier status. (This would be me if it were possible, I go slightly out of my way right now to earn 75K and then get to SE with the Chase AP card).

AC: $250,000 to get the remaining 50,000 SQM. (Ignoring SQD requirements)
DL: $240,000 to get 18,000 more MQM
UA: $240,000 if you fly 60 segments, $320,000 otherwise.
AA: $113,000 /$213,000 for PPro/ExPlat
(All figures in CAD, using $0.75 FX rate)

So contrary to my assumptions going in, AC is already in the ball park for rewarding CC spend on a "$ spent to earn status level X" basis.

My guesses:
-SDC will be dollar based, along the lines of United or Delta, and the status tiers will roughly follow the current SQD numbers + a 25%/50% increase.
-Earnings on CC spend will increase a similar amount

The US3 make money from the CC arrangements and not from flying. It could be argued that there is likely a point at which it will make sense to fly less people as long as they keep increasing the use of the CC. Now clearly this is not going to work completely as an airline has to fly passengers, but when you look at the financial results of the US3, if not for the CC's, they would be losing money quarter after quarter after quarter.

AC will likely continue to incentivize people to obtain and use the CC's. As to what they do with the loyalty program, I don't think we've seen any programs, except maybe Alaska, enhance the offering (status miles for reward tickets as an example). I expect will see higher SQD levels per status level, and some effort to close the loophole that is allowing some of us to keep banking SE status year over year. I am not especially optimistic that we're going to get something we like. I suspect it will more be what level of awful do we ultimately get.

Sounds very similar to recent changes by BA

That's really not true. As I've noted above, a continued partnership with an airline is crucial to the FFP's success. You can't make money from the CC deals if you don't fly. Just like people sometimes say all of Costco's profit comes from selling memberships not from selling goods, which is nonsense, because without screaming deals on big-screen TVs and Kirkland vodka or whatever, no one would pay the membership fees.

In any business with thin margins, it's easy to cherry-pick one line item and say that bit of revenue is responsible for more than 100% of the profits, but it's just not accurate.

I'm not saying loyalty programs, and the CC partnerships that drive them, aren't profitable. But it has been way overblown in recent years. AC discloses next to nothing about how it derives revenue from Aeroplan and the CC partnerships. The US3's financials have a few interesting tidbits, but not one of them treats the loyalty program as a separate business segment with its own P&L. This makes it very easy to hype up the revenues derived from these programs, which are somewhat visible, without talking about the costs. It's easy to point to DL generating $7.1 billion from its Amex partnership last year, but the costs of that go well beyond the miles awarded for CC spending. There's also some portion of running the lounge network, the cost of baggage fee waivers, and so on. None of those costs get broken out anywhere.

That means that when airline executives talk to investors, analysts, the press, etc, it's very easy for them to talk up how great the loyalty programs are. And maybe they'll even cobble together some managerial accounting that estimates the actual profits, but it's not subject to normal accounting regulations, and even if it were, there's a fair amount of leeway in some of the internal estimates that would go in to this stuff. For example, if there's an obligation to provide advertising for the co-branded CC on the IFE, some of the revenue needs to get allocated to that, which would be the flying part of the airline, rather than the loyalty program. Let's say AC usually charges $x per passenger-minute of ads. If I want to maximize the profitability of the loyalty program, I allocate a very low figure to these ads - maybe we usually sell the ads on 3-month campaigns in a somewhat geographically targeted fashion where people buy y volume. But because the CC program will be committed to ads across the airline for 5 years, they might be buying 50y passenger-minutes of ads. So I might "charge" them only 0.25x per passenger-minute of ads - classic bulk discount. On the other hand, if I wanted to reduce the apparent profitability of the loyalty program, I would "charge" it the same rate as the other ads. Heck, by guaranteeing them first position of every ad roll, maybe I could even charge it a premium - 1.1x, 1.2x, I don't know. At a certain point, the auditors would reign me in, but there's always a lot of latitude in these things.

The same is true of the way they account for the cost of existing points redemptions, by the way, which affects both CC partnerships and miles that are earned and burned purely through flying. There are rules and guidelines and the auditors will look at these things - and you can't change the methodology every quarter to suit your purposes - but are estimates and ranges and so on and so forth that let the airline shade things in whichever direction it wants to go.

Anyway, yes, I expect the program to continue to shift qualification and benefits somewhat towards CC holders/spenders, but let's not get carried away with these notions of the loyalty tail wagging the airline dog.