Last year Air Canada bought Canadian Airlines.

This long drawn out saga (for which I will spare you the gory details), ended with Air Canada purchasing Canadian Airlines and kicking off a 180 day quality customer service commitment to it's newly consolidated customer base.

Those 180 days recently ended and I wanted to provide some input on the status of the newly integrated Aeroplan air line mileage program.

Being a frequent traveler and a long time member of both the Aeroplan Star Alliance and Canadian Plus One World partner programs, I have to admit to favouring the little touches CDN+ employed in attempts to oust their big competitive brother Aeroplan.

Today I thought I would list a bunch of the Aeroplan and Canadian plus program features side by side in order to show where I believe that Aeroplan has missed out on the little bonuses the Canadian Plus program employed.

Membership Levels

As with most programs, there are three bonus levels in both Aeroplan and CDN+. In CDN+, Club, Gold and Platinum are matched by Aeroplan’s Prestige, Elite and Super elite.

A customer could attain these levels by gathering a certain number of flights and/or air miles in a given year. It is important to describe these levels since a lot of the little niceties are related to them. Here are the qualifying tables:

Aeroplan/CDN+ levels:

• Prestige/Club - 18,000 miles/30 flights
• Gold/Elite - 35,00 miles/60 flights
• Exec Platinum/Super Elite - 100,000 miles/150 flights

I’ll get to the differences in the sections below which describe some of the things I really appreciated as a Canadian Plus member and now miss as an amalgamated Aeroplan member.


Web site

The Canadian Plus web site design was stunning. It was functional, followed the three clicks to any information paradigm and was visually pleasing. The most important aspect in my opinion however was that the monthly statement that you received in the mail was IDENTICALLY reproduced on-line, both for content and for appearance. This was an amazing benefit and very neat because if you were familiar with one format you immediately knew the other.

The real benefit however, was the extra level of breakdown of information that CDN+ had over Aeroplan. In one easy spot, you could call up any previous statement and get:

• exact details on flights, dates and mileage
• the amount of miles and bonuses earned
• current account status as of the statement date

In Aeroplan your summary is a single line telling you the points earned for the qualifying period.
This bugs me so much I had to put up a couple samples so you can see why Aeroplan is so woefully inadequate in this area in my opinion:

• Canadian Plus: http://members.fortunecity.com/cwkemp/aeroplan/cdnplus.html
• Aeroplan: http://members.fortunecity.com/cwkemp/aeroplan/aeroplan.html

Also another niggly point, but when you moved from Club to Gold, the Canadian Plus web page changed to have gold accents just as the paper statement did. In Aeroplan, your little red word ‘Prestige’ turned to a little red ‘Elite’.

Thanks for the effort guys.


Upgrade stickers

After certain amounts of travel (either at Club qualifying levels or subsequent thresholds) CDN+ gave out little convenient packages of stickers that would allow you to upgrade to business class if there was seating available. Aeroplan provides similar upgrade certificates, but here are some differences: :

• 4-12 CDN+ stickers fit on a sheet the size of 1 AC certificate
• The stickers were valid for 2 years (except for the last batch in 2000)
• Canadian had the concept of Ultimate Upgrades for Gold and Exec Platinum members. These little beauties were upgrades from any fare class at anytime anywhere in the world. This is the way ALL upgrade stickers should be...Air Canada are you listening?


Cards

Okay this one is a little silly, but again it’s the little things right?

The Gold membership package for Canadian came with a really nice gold card for your wallet. It also comes with two luggage tags and leather straps, a nice package describing the service and a useful slim line booklet containing the extra family lounge passes and upgrade stickers.

The Aeroplan package came:

• in a plain envelope,
• with pamphlets of propaganda,
• with no upgrade stickers since it looks like you have to earn them at certain thresholds this year

Also, the black card with the HUGE white “Elite” looks far worse than ever their own basic membership card which is white with a very attractive maple leaf on the front.

Award Redemption

This comment is not based on a statistical study, but the wait time for redeeming award travel does lie in favour of Air Canada. Canadian Plus was really only good for wait times on the special Gold member phone line, but I find the Elite membership phone line equally as short.

An important note on award redemption level however is that both the Elite and Gold levels are awesome since they don’t have to use the pre-allocated open ‘award’ seats which are allocated on a per flight. All they need to do is have a single open seat of any type.

This is probably the single biggest benefit of the Elite or Gold levels in my opinion BTW.


Amex Miles Affiliation

This Canadian Plus benefit ROCKED!

Amex and Canadian Airlines had a deal whereby if you transferred 5000 or more Amex Reward Points to your Canadian Plus account, you could redeem a points travel ticket at a reduced points cost such as:

• Domestic Short Haul - 15,000 reduced to 12,000
• Domestic Long Haul - 25,000 reduced to 22,000
• I can’t remember the others, but I think they reduced by 5-7K

Air Canada - BRING THIS BACK PLEASE!!!!


Bonus Programs

Canadian was forever putting on bonus programs. They used scratch and win cards which gave varying levels of points out on the flights/empress lounge memberships/free flights. Another program was a random letter of conditions to it’s members such as:

• If you take at least one CP-designated flight, and use any four CP program partners between July 15th and October 15th 1999, you will earn a special bonus of 5000 CP points.

These bonuses were not every month nor every year, but as a member of Aeroplan I have never seen the ‘extra’ bonus similar to the Canadian Plus bonuses.

Aeroplan does of course have the "double your mileage" bonuses every once in a while, but this is about as exciting as it gets.


Summary

Now don’t get me wrong, I still think Aeroplan is one of the better airline mileage programs out there (especially considering the miles never expire like in some US and Asian air mile plans) but there is always room for improvements.

I hope the people at Air Canada take a look at their poorer brother and implement some of the classy touches which added a bit of joie de vivre!

As a last thought, I truly hope that these little things I mention were not the extra cost items that put Canadian Airlines out of business. But you never know...


Feb 16th 2001 update - Spoke too soon. Aeroplan has learned from their little brother and sent out new cards, luggage tags, upgrade certificates and an information booklet. Still not quite as convenient as the slim line CDN+ book with the upgrade stickers inside, but kudos guys for adding some touches.

Feb 23rd 2001 update- ARRGH!!! The worst change yet!!! We just booked a flight and attempted to use our new fandangled Aeroplan Upgrade Stickers and just encountered the worst program difference. In CDN+ at the Gold level you could upgrade from ANY fare class. Today I tried as an Elite member and I would have had to pay an extra $260 per person from Ottawa to Calgary to use my 'Free' upgrades. Wonderful.




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