How To Book Complex Trips with Aeroplan

Aeroplan offers generous stopover and routing policies that allow you to book epic once-in-a-lifetime trips.

For those who wish to maximize their flying time and visit multiple destinations in one trip, a complex multi-stop Aeroplan redemption can be one of the best sweet spots that the program has to offer.

In this guide, we’ll walk through Aeroplan’s generous, albeit complex, fare combination logic and routing rules to help you book your own round-the-world trips. 

Examples of Complex Aeroplan Trips

To begin, let’s price out a few different multi-stop itineraries using the Flight Reward Chart. 

To keep things sufficiently aspirational, let’s focus on the business class pricing in our analysis. And to keep things simple, we’ll also exclude Air Canada’s dynamic pricing, assuming that travel takes place entirely on partner airlines or at the lower end of the dynamic range on any Air Canada flights.

(It’s true that dynamic pricing can negatively drive up the cost of award flights with Air Canada, but factoring it in to the below examples would result in additional complexity to an already complex situation.)

Before we get started with the examples of complex itineraries, make sure you’re familiar with the following basic facts about Aeroplan and how the program works:

• Aeroplan prices itineraries based on one-way bounds.
• Layovers are stays of less than 24 hours, while stopovers are stays of more than 24 hours.
• One stopover outside of Canada and the US)is permitted on a one-way bound for an additional 5,000 Aeroplan points.
• Open-jaws – flying into one city and out of another – can only take place between one-way bounds, not within one-way bounds.
• You can customize your routing between any two given points, including scheduling layovers of up to 24 hours.
• Each Aeroplan ticket can have a maximum of 12 flight segments if an Air Canada flight is included, and up to 16 flight segments if only partner flights are included.

Example 1: A Tour of the Asia-Pacific

• Vancouver–Tokyo (layover) on ANA
• Tokyo–Hong Kong (stopover) on ANA
• Hong Kong–Bangkok (layover) on Thai Airways
• Bangkok–Singapore (layover) on Singapore Airlines
• Singapore–Perth (destination; open-jaw) on Singapore Airlines
• Brisbane–Vancouver on Air Canada

Depending on whether long layovers suit your travel style or not, you can assume the layovers are either long layovers or convenient short…