- Aeroplan
Miles now have a set 7 year lifespan
- Accounts
with no activity for 12 months will lose all miles
- Expired
miles can be reinstated for a fee
- Seats
can be had for any flight at anytime....at a major cost
- New enhanced
online booking engine
Over the past
weekend Aeroplan, Air Canada's loyalty program announced two major changes
to the program which helps out Aeroplan with liabilities on their financial
statements but make things worse for th% not so frequent flyerr who
do not add miles to their account on a regular basis.
Effective January 1, 2007, Aeroplan Miles will xave a 7 year time-stamp
attached to them for the month they were earned in and those!miles not
used within that 7 years will expire and be deducted from Aeroplan mgmbers
account on a monthly basis. All miles earned prior to January 1, 2007
will be(date stamped is December 31, 2006.
How will this affect Aeroplan Members?
Aeroplan states the average time between e eember earning a mile an`
spdnding it is two a.d half(}ears, so many meMbers should not"be affected
but there are`those (particularly infrequejt flyers) who"are building
miles up fop that"trip of lifetime and that may take more then seven
yearó so they may stand a chance of losing miles. I for one am included
I have miles in my account that were earned more then seven years ago
as I have just been trying to build up my account for some really nice
trips.
Effective July
7, 2007 Aeroplan will be changing the terms of their expiry policy from
3 years of inactivity to 1 year. Which means if you do not accumulate
or redeem miles at least once every 12 months you will lose ALL of your
miles. This is not new to the Frequent Flyer industry as many airlines
have imposed expiry dates ranging from 12-36 months however there still
are many programs that do not have expiry dates on their miles, especially
Aeroplan's largest rival, AIR MILES™
How will this affect Aeroplan Members?
Aeroplan states that they have expanded the earning and redeeming abilities
of members by adding on more loyalty partners such as ESSO and offering
rewards like Gift Cards so that members have more choices then simply
earning or burning miles.
How can I keep my miles from expiring?
For Canadian members it is as easy as filling up at ESSO with $3 of
gas to earn 1 Aeroplan mile to keep your account active, however for
members residing outside of Canada, they will have to continue to rely
on travel to earn Aeroplan miles, which for some members may be difficult
as they may not travel every year or use one of Aeroplan's partners
on a yearly basis.
Effective immediately Aeroplan member's miles that have expired
or lapsed after the 7 year period can have their miles reinstated for
another 7 years by paying a $30 administrative fee plus $0.01 per restored
mile.
How will this affect Aeroplan Members?
It will hit Aeroplan members in the pocket book if they let their
accounts lapse and want them reinstated, particularly for those with
lower amounts of miles. Whereas it may be worthwhile to restore multiple
hundreds of thousands of miles to claim a business class seat, those
people who lose 25,000 Aeroplan miles would have to spend $280 to restore
them. On top of this $280 they would then have try to find availability
for a North America reward flight plus pay the taxes, added fuel surcharge,
and no frequent flyer mileage accrual on the ticket. In this case they
would more then likely be better off just buying a ticket for the dates
they want and earn frequent flyer miles on top of that for roughly the
same cost depending on where they were flying to.
Aeroplan has introduced ClassicPlus rewards to replace their
Avenue flight reward option. ClassicPlus rewards offer Aeroplan members
access to 100% of Air Canada and Air Canada Jazz's available seat inventory.
What this means is that if their is a seat available on the flight outside
of Aeroplan's classic award availability of 8% of all seats per route
per month, you can get that seat for a higher amount of Aeroplan miles.
The ClassicPlus seats start at 33% more miles (which is the same as
the old avenue rewards) then classic awards with the exception of flights
to Europe which will start at 70,000 miles versus Avenue's 80,000.
How will this affect Aeroplan Members?
In effect this is an enhancement to the program as now if their is a
seat open on a flight you can redeem miles for it, whereas before if
all the Aeroplan inventory for a flight was full you could not get a
seat for the flights. For frequent flyers and heavy credit card mileage
earners this is generally a good thing as they have many miles to burn
and spending a few more miles to the get the flights you want may be
worth it. The only issue we see so far with this is that the rewards
are dynamic and as Aeroplan states they START at 33% more but some quick
runs on the Aeroplan booking engine by ourselves and frequent flyers
on FlyerTalk are finding flights at 100%,200% even 300% more miles then classic rewards.
In comparison, most other North American carriers offer unlimited access
to seat availability at a maximum of 2 times the cost of a regular reward
ticket. We will have to wait and see if this is just something Aeroplan
is testing or if they will keep these amounts 'dynamic'. So as is typical
in this industry it will all depend on when and where you want to go
since 33% is better then 100% on another North American carrier but
200% is not.
Probably the best thing to come out this weekend is the launch
of the new Aeroplan booking engine on www.aeroplan.com.
It is much easier to use then the previous one, has nice features added
searching multiple destinations at once (great for the large US metropolitan
areas with more then one airport), month long availability calendars,
and smart forms that as you type a city name or code it will come up
so you don't have to type the whole name in.
- Patrick Sojka
Editor/Owner
Rewards Canada
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