Strategic Bound Breaking with Aeroplan

Aeroplan prices itineraries according to a complex set of rules. Applying your knowledge of these rules can enhance your trip, save you points, and help you stretch out the value of your points to the maximum.

Let’s take a look at the practice of strategic bound breaking with Aeroplan in more detail.

What Is Strategic Bound Breaking?

Aeroplan has a series of rules that determine where a “one-way bound” begins and ends, and thus how much a given itinerary will cost.

In some cases, the structure of the distance-based Flight Reward Chart causes the pricing to vary depending on where you “break the bound”.

In other words, there are some cases where you can strategically choose to begin or end your one-way bound, in an effort to keep the distance flown in a lower distance band, which results in your itinerary costing fewer Aeroplan points.

A Few Examples

Let’s look at some examples to spell out how strategic bound breaking could be beneficial to you.

Example 1: Choosing Your Stopover Strategically

Consider the example of a Thunder Bay resident who wants to visit Istanbul and Tel Aviv on the same trip, flying in business class. She puts together the following proposed itinerary:

• Thunder Bay–Toronto–Istanbul (stopover)–Tel Aviv, on Air Canada and Turkish Airlines
• Tel Aviv–Toronto–Thunder Bay, on Air Canada

To keep things simple, let’s assume that our traveller is able to find pricing for the Air Canada flights at the lower end of the dynamic pricing range.

Looking at the “Between North America–Atlantic zones” chart, our traveller would calculate the pricing for this redemption as follows:

• Outbound journey of 6,382 miles: This falls into the third distance band of 6,001–8,000 miles, and would therefore cost 85,000 Aeroplan points in business class
• Return journey of 6,356 miles: This also falls into the third distance band of 6,001–8,000 miles, and would therefore cost 85,000 Aeroplan points in business class
• Adding a stopover in Istanbul costs an additional 5,000 Aeroplan points
• Total of 175,000 Aeroplan points

(Note that as of September 1, 2022, the cost of a business class flight in the third distance band is increasing to 90,000 Aeroplan points. This same itinerary would therefore cost 185,000 points.)

However, imagine that we were to “break the bound: in Istanbul instead. The proposed itinerary would look as follows:

• Thunder…