What’s Happening with Aeroplan Partner Award Availability?

If you’ve been searching for award flights with Aeroplan recently, you may have noticed that there are fewer available options with some partner airlines these days.

While it’s still possible to find plenty of flights with Air Canada, as well as flights with some partner airlines, there’s been a rather significant change in partner award availability in the last while, especially when compared to previous years.

We’d like to take stock of the situation at hand, as it’s something that now materially impacts many Aeroplan users’ experience.

What’s Happening with Aeroplan Partner Award Availability?

One of Aeroplan‘s strengths as a loyalty program is the number of partner airlines with which you can redeem points. 

At the moment, that number stands at 47 airlines, which includes both Star Alliance carriers and airlines that aren’t aligned with any particular alliance.

For Star Alliance airlines, award availability tends to be relatively consistent between loyalty programs. If you’re able to book two business class seats with Swiss on Aeroplan, you can probably find those same two seats with United MileagePlus or Avianca LifeMiles, with some exceptions.

However, lately, we’ve noticed that some Star Alliance airlines haven’t been showing up in search results on the Aeroplan website, despite award availability showing up with other Star Alliance loyalty programs, and with ExpertFlyer.

For example, in January 2024, the calendar feature on the United MileagePlus website shows ample award availability for Swiss business class from Montreal to Zurich.

Indeed, these same seats show as available on Avianca LifeMiles…

As well as on ExpertFlyer…

However, when we search for the same flights on the Aeroplan website, Swiss isn’t an option on any of these dates. 

However, if you call the Aeroplan Contact Centre, the agents can see the Swiss award availability, and can then complete the booking over the phone.

It’s worth noting that the pattern of some long-haul business class partner award flights only being available over the phone with Aeroplan has been noted with Lufthansa-group airlines, as well as other airlines (including EVA Air and ANA). In some cases, this applies only when flying to specific countries.

For example, flights to India and China on partner airlines appear to be heavily restricted for online bookings. Again, some flights that show up on…