Big Changes at Aeroplan: What Dynamic Pricing Means for Your Miles

Air Canada’s Aeroplan program has gained significant popularity in the points and miles industry, largely due to its generous award chart that offers fixed pricing for flights on all Star Alliance partners. However, the program faced a setback this month with the introduction of dynamic award pricing for certain partner airlines, including United Airlines.

Here’s what you need to know.

Aeroplan Shifts to Dynamic Pricing

Air Canada has historically operated hybrid zone and distance-based award charts, with award prices being determined by the flight’s distance and the region(s) of travel.

For example, here is what the chart used to look like for flights between the North American and Pacific Regions:

As you can see, while flights on Air Canada were dynamically priced between a specified range, flights on all partners (except for Emirates and FlyDubai) were given a fixed award price in all cabin classes.

Fixed award pricing is always a welcome sight, ensuring a guaranteed redemption cost irrespective of the fluctuation in demand or the cash price of the ticket. This can lead to some incredible redemption values, especially in business class, where prices can rise and remain high fairly quickly.

Impact of New Award Pricing

The aforementioned hybrid structure of the charts will remain the same moving forward, but with some big changes coming to the way some flights will be priced. While fixed pricing remains in place for most of Air Canada’s partners, dynamic pricing will now be applied to several partner airlines, most notably United Airlines and Etihad Airways.

Here is what the new chart will look like between the same North America and Pacific regions:

With this new chart, flights on Air Canada and the select partners no longer show a price range with upper and lower limits, but rather just a starting price and what Aeroplan denotes as a “median price,” intended to showcase what they believe to be the new expectation.

This median price number is derived from historical data on member redemptions for these particular carriers; as of today, the data used to derive the median price was collected between January 2024 and December 2024.

Air Canada plans to update the redemption data and median price number every quarter to ensure the greatest accuracy. It is important to note that median pricing will not be displayed on any of the charts that don’t include the North American region, nor will median pricing be shown for any First Class redemptions.

Photo: Courtesy of Air Canada

Although these changes only affect a handful of airlines, US-based customers are sure to be displeased with a pretty significant devaluation of award redemptions on United, both domestically and internationally.

Short-haul domestic flights on United have always been a secret sweet spot of this program, with flights less than 500 miles being offered for as low as 6,000 points in economy and 15,000 points in business. With the new changes, these prices are now expected to fall around 10,000 and 19,000, respectively, according to the chart’s new median price numbers.

As of the time of writing, business class redemption prices in this range are even showing as high as 30,000 points, a whopping 100% increase from their previously fixed values.

Alternatives Within Star Alliance

While international awards have also increased on United, other Star Alliance partners will still have the same fixed award rates applied to redemptions on their metal as they did before.

This means carriers like Lufthansa, SWISS, and Turkish Airlines can still be utilized to take advantage of these lower fixed prices that continue to give some incredibly outsized redemption value.

Photo: Lufthansa, Airbus A350-900. Courtesy of Lukas Souza / Unsplash

Furthermore, it is anticipated that the shift to dynamic pricing for the select partners will result in greater availability of award space. Looking specifically at Etihad, we can now see Aeroplan showing access to their business class product again, albeit at higher prices than you may find via Etihad’s other partners like American Airlines.

Overall, these changes are a significant devaluation of the Aeroplan program, especially for those customers based in the U.S. who enjoyed taking advantage of the cheap domestic award pricing for United flights.

Dynamic pricing naturally creates an environment of uncertainty, and removing the upper limits suggests that award prices on Air Canada and these select partner airlines may skyrocket during times of high demand. However, there is still great value to be had with the program on redemptions with Air Canada’s other Star Alliance partners, who continue to maintain an expansive global route network.