Analyzing Aeroplan’s Preferred Pricing on Air Canada Flights

Preferred Pricing is an Aeroplan feature that provides discounts on Air Canada flights as you engage more with the program, in which members with Aeroplan Elite Status or a Aeroplan co-branded credit card are rewarded with lower award prices than members without elite status or a credit card.

In this article, we’ll conduct an in-depth analysis on Preferred Pricing to assess the significance of the discounts on award pricing based on your level of engagement with the program (i.e., various levels of elite status and/or credit card ownership).

Methodology

Similar to our previous analysis following the launch of the most recent iteration of Aeroplan in November 2020, we chose a number of Air Canada routes and took samples of the pricing across different routes and dates. In an effort to avoid any fluctuations in prices from dynamic pricing, we conducted the searches within a single day. 

For this analysis, we took samples from the following combinations of status level and credit card ownership:

From each account, we conducted a search on a range of domestic and international Air Canada routes on four separate dates throughout the year: December 21, March 21, June 21, and September 21.

While the primary purpose of this analysis is looking into Preferred Pricing, we’ll also get some insight into dynamic pricing by sampling throughout the year. However, we’ll save a full discussion of dynamic pricing for a future in-depth analysis.

For each route, we’ll present the data and offer a brief analysis, before looking at broad themes and conclusions across all charts at the end of the article.

For our searches, we used the following criteria:

• Only direct flights with Air Canada were considered, and if a direct flight wasn’t available on any of the dates, the cell is marked with a dash.
• In the event of multiple direct Air Canada flights on a given date (such as Toronto–Montreal), only the cheapest available option was chosen
• The three values in each cell represent Economy (Standard), Economy (Flex), and Economy (Latitude), in that order.
• When calculating the discounts, we’ll only consider the Economy (Standard) fares, for reasons discussed in the analysis.

Note that there were some cases where dynamic pricing affected searches conducted within mere hours of each other. This resulted in one of the tiers having pricing that was inconsistent with the rest of the tiers, and we have…