Effective today (March 25, 2025) the dynamically priced award chart for flights on Air Canada now includes United Airlines, Emirates, Flydubai, Etihad Airways, and the program’s Canadian regional airline partners Calm Air, Canadian North, and PAL (Provincial Airlines). Award flights on these airlines will no longer fall into the set award chart pricing that was set in place in 2020 and continues to be applied to all other Aeroplan partner airlines.
What does dynamic pricing mean? It means the amount of points required for an award flight will be based on the cash cost of the flight which of course will fluctuate based upon the route, time of travel and how full the flight is. This means that Aeroplan members may find that award flights with these partners will be more expensive or even less expensive than they are accustomed to. Historically, moves to dynamic pricing have almost always ended up being a devaluation to the program from what it was prior to the change.
Back in February Air Canada stated “While the redemption rates under this chart can be higher than our fixed partner award chart and can vary from one itinerary to another, these changes will enable greater availability for reward seats on these airlines than before.”
And in my very few random searches, they are definitely higher now and in some of the following examples, you’ll see some are significantly higher. I did see some better availability on United for flights within the U.S. and the increase in points cost on the example below is probably the least painful one.
Award flight examples with the new pricing
Montreal and Ottawa to Iqaluit
Routes to Northern Canada with Aeroplan partners have long been an amazing sweet spot for the program. Tickets purchased with cash tend to be very expensive so to be able to get them for as little as 10,000 points prior to today was an amazing deal. Now with a couple of searches it look like you’ll need 17,000 or more points for those same one way flights – ouch! is all I can say
Here’s Montreal to Iqaluit for 17,700 points (This seems to be the new minimum for this route – outside of any potential seat sale pricing)
Ottawa to Iqaluit for 18,100 points (This seems to be the new minimum for this route – outside of any potential seat sale pricing)
United Airlines Los Angeles to Newark
If you could find availability on this route before, it would have been 12,500 points one way in economy. The minimum now looks to be 15,000 Aeroplan points one way
Etiahd Toronto to Abu Dhabi Economy Class
This used to be 55,000 points and from my searches today we’re seeing these awards run in the mid to high 70,000 point ranges. That’s another big jump!
Emirates Toronto to Dubai Business & First Class
Emirates redemptions for Aeroplan members have had their own reward chart in place since late 2022 but now these awards are dynamically. Here’s an example of some of the dynamic pricing for Emirates business and first class:
Under the old chart business class awards ranged from 80,000 to 180,000 points one way and first class were 225,000 to 475,000 points. In today’s example you can see business class is way above the old range of points while the first class option still falls into the previously published range.
Calm Air to Churchill or Flin Flon
Another favourite of the Canadian points & miles community were flights to Northern Manitoba with Calm Air. In my random searches and also using some award search tools I could not find any availability! Perhaps the points and miles community gobbled them up before today’s change! Let me know if you are able to find anything!
Wrapping it up
As I am always a hopeful person, when Air Canada announced these changes the hope was that increases in award pricing would be reasonable for the increased availability. The only awards I can say that may have fallen into that “hope” are domestic routes with United (but I only did a couple of searches so I could be totally wrong) but in my other limited route checks on the other partner airlines, the increases in point requirements are pretty bad.
I do want to state that the award flight examples I have above represent a drop in the bucket of award options. There is the possibility of some better points pricing appearing but also worse!
Let us know your thoughts and feel free to pass along details of the number of points required for any award flights you find in your searches! (Most notably ones that require a lot more points now or even if you find any that require less points)