Business Platinum Card from American Express
130,000 MR points
New Aeroplan: The Aftermath, Six Months Later
Share this Article
Business Platinum Card from American Express
- Earn 90,000 MR points upon spending $15,000 in the first three months
- Plus, earn 40,000 MR points upon making a purchase in months 14–17 as a cardholder
- And, earn 1.25x MR points on all purchases
- Also, receive a $200 annual travel credit
- Transfer MR points to Aeroplan and other frequent flyer programs for premium flights
- Unlimited airport lounge access for you and one guest at Priority Pass, Plaza Premium, Centurion, and other lounges
- Credits and rebates for business expenses throughout the year with Amex Offers
- Bonus MR points for referring family and friends
- Qualify for the card as a sole proprietor
- Annual fee: $799
18 Comments
Prince of Travel is the leading resource for using frequent flyer miles, credit card points, and loyalty programs to travel the world at a fraction of the price.
Join our Sunday newsletter below to get weekly updates delivered straight to your inbox.
Have a question? Just ask.
Platinum Membership
Our Platinum members get access to a Circle community, exclusive live learning sessions, and in-person gatherings with like-minded travellers.
Top Offers
Latest News
Prince of Travel Elites
I echo some of the earlier critiques . For folks who have a limitless reservoir of points, the new Aeroplan is an improvement as every seat on every flight is available, at the right price (points). So in the world of Aeroplan points, if your are in the super wealthy class, life is good. However if you are middle class from a points perspective, it is devastating. In the old Aeroplan, for around 150,000 to 160,000 points, one could do a ROW business class Canada to Asia with one and not that long ago two stopovers. Now quite often you are lucky to get Toronto to Vancouver business class for that much. The elimination of add-on fees does not even begin to make up for the implicit devaluation.
I agree about the variable quality of the advice through Aeroplan agents. I just qualified for 25K, and I phoned Aeroplan about use of the my new e-upgrades with a couple of existing flights that were booked in flexible premium economy using points.
She told me categorically that e-upgrades could only be used on revenue flights. Huh? When I challenged her, she conceded that this may have been revamped on November 8th.
Ricky, can you go in there a do some training?
I’m grateful for the fact I found F in YVR through the new program launch. From early on, they were willing to help me book a complex itinerary. I’ll definitely keep them in my back pocket, for future complex bookings.
It also brings back the memory of the bad agents. One was insulted that I asked if they were done their shift soon – If you want to stay late and do my 16 segments, be my guest.
Can you provide an update on what’s happening with complex priority reward bookings Ricky? Is it dead ?
Did they kill the 6 bound priority rewards?
With regards to points posting slowly from TD Visa cards, should I be assigning blame to TD rather than AP?
I would think so, since CIBC and Amex seem to have no trouble posting the points (and Buddy Pass) within a few days of the statement.
I wonder if there’s another way to assess Aeroplan 2.0(beta). Who benefits from each category? Ricky’s assessments are competent and expert and his writing is eloquent. But reading about the Aeroplan relaunch, I’ve always felt frustrated, because my own use case doesn’t fit the profile of someone who comes out ahead. I’m not an uninformed Aeroplan user, nor am I a hardcore 20something in the fast lane of “the game”. I don’t travel domestically, I wasn’t paying surcharges before (so their removal doesn’t help me one single dollar), I never buy paid tickets, I book all my award tickets as oneway in Premium cabins, I book in the final few days before travel (I even book my homebound flight as my vacation is nearing its end). These things make me different from the warrior blogger with 1,700,000 Aeros and 30 “speculative bookings”, or the SuperElite who travels Fredericton to Edmonton 20 times a year. So when I kvetch that the relaunch of Aeroplan is a nothingburger for me, I’m not arguing that the “average” Aeroplan user is wrong, or that Ricky is a dupe fanboy; I’m saying that what’s relevant is who who who, not what what what. For “average” Aeroplan users and for Aeroplan high users, Ricky’s assessment is probably bang on. For me, the new program is almost entirely a negative. I like the 5000-point stopover but I hate phoning to beg for it. I hate the increases in points for all my bookings. I hate dynamic (meaning higher) pricing on the few AC-operated flights that interest me. I agree with @Bob that multicity isn’t ever happening in a useful form (they’ll do something, they’ll call it “MultiCity” but it won’t actually deliver a satisfactory result). So I respectfully accept that Aeroplan’s elaborate revamp is great for some (“most”, perhaps), and I am glad so many are getting satsfaction. But for me and my flock, they didn’t fix what was broken, they added stuff that of minimal value (“more choice”, the scariest marketing phrase there is) and they raised the price of everything worth buying. It still surprises me that I seem to be an outlier in this view.
DenB, I agree with every word you wrote. You’re not alone and I will bet that most are like you. The negatives greatly exceed the positives. And I’m always surprised that so many bloggers praise this new Aeroplan 2.0.
The article you’re suggesting (who benefits?) can be found here: New Aeroplan: The Winners & Losers.
This one was more about evaluating the new program’s performance in its first six months, rather than necessarily comparing against the old Aeroplan, a topic on which I think plenty of ink has been spilled in the months from August 2020 onwards.
Revisiting it, though, surely you’d agree that something like the Buddy Pass conversion has been a boon for middle-of-the-pack members like yourself, no? We’ve never seen the core cards rise to the level of 50,000 points before, and these more powerful options on the earning side can help you earn back your more expensive last-minute one-way premium flights, especially if captured by the rest of your flock as well.
Ricky you’re right, the Buddy Pass conversion (thanks for posting about it, boy did I jump on that) and the current crop of Bonus offers are great. But they won’t last as long as the deval and the negative program changes and the need to phone for a stopover and the complete absence of MultiCity and the tripling of the price of the AC flights I used to take. I can’t help feeling that we’re the frogs, just recently dropped into the cold water before they turn on the flame. The new Best Practices (to maximize my benefits from Aeroplan) require activities that are beyond my reach, unlike the old program.
You are definitely not alone, DenB. Minor glamour and a new coat to help you swallow the devaluation–it certainly doesn’t help when all bloggers are tripping over one another to sing their praises up and down the isle of Aeroplan. As you say, it’s different when you’re swimming in points as I’m sure Richard is, or if you log the domestic miles heavily.
They have lowered the bar for the lower run of people, and improved the view at the top…but the middle has been gutted.
Here here. Well said and couldn’t agree more.
I totally agree about the e-store. My critique:
1) Use the portal. Buy something. The purchase doesn’t even show up for weeks, then when it does, hangs on pending forever. Eventually base points and points show up.
2) The date on the estore for the purchase shows when the merchant posts the purchase to aeroplan, not the purchase date. How does one match up that to one’s records
3) If that were not bad enough, you can’t click on the estore purchase to match back to order numbers, invoice numbers, dates, nothing. You take it on faith that they have calculated the correct base and bonus points,
4) It was my understanding that only the e-store two point elite status bonus is ineligible to earn credits towards the Everyday Spend goal of 100K points per calendar year to become 25K elite. I’m not one of those. Yet since AC turned on this feature, only the base points have been credited towards the everyday spend, not the bonus points earned on their 2X, 5X and 7X bonus promotional periods. They need to fix this or update the language to exclude all bonuses.
Fix it, Air Canada!
4)
Any news of what kind of partners we might see? It seems Alaska and Emirates might severe ties so would be a great opportunity for Aeroplan to rope in Emirates!
Emirates and Etihad? ahem, not sure that’s likely
I am very glad to see you mention the poor performance of the Aeroplan eStore. Slow crediting of points, inconsistent crediting of status points and confusing identification of credits make checking your Aeroplan activity difficult. The eStore portal is cumbersome for searching retailers and the order history there does not always match your Aeroplan account. Stores without any bonus at all are routinely listed as participating in “special” shopping events.
Face it, a multicity engine is never coming.