Air Canada miles belong to the Aeroplan program and it’s one all North American flyers should be familiar with, especially for infant awards.

Updated October 7, 2025. Somehow I missed an earlier unannounced devaluation of United flights booked with Air Canada miles. That’s now been corrected below, along with removing that sweet spot from the list.

For this post, I’m not going to get into the details of the elite status aspect of the program and instead focus on the redemption side of the program.

It’s easy to transfer points to Air Canada miles

Air Canada maintains a website that catalogues all of the programs that transfer points into Aeroplan miles. You’ll find many of the usual suspects here (American Express, Bilt, Chase, and Capital One). Each of these programs normally transfers points to Aeroplan at a 1:1 ratio. There are occasional bonus transfer amounts that could provide a temporary boost to the transfer ratio, but unless your travel aligns with those transfer bonuses, you shouldn’t be moving points over speculatively.

What you’ll end up finding is that if you need to boost your balance for a flight, you have plenty of options to quickly do so.

Aeroplan sells Air Canada miles cheaply

One of the easiest ways to build points quickly is just to buy them. Sure, you could transfer points in from other programs. Or maybe you have interest in signing up for credit cards. But the quickest way to build your stash is to simply buy them. Some programs have a terrible price to pay for miles (and remember there is a base price for all miles). Air Canada does a good job selling miles relatively cheaply.

The Aeroplan program sells miles normally for a base price of 100,000 miles for $3,500CA (~$2,450US). That price wouldn’t motivate most people, but there are times where you can get up to a 100% bonus on miles. Yes, usually these bonuses require you to buy a lot all at once. But if you can stomach that, you’d potentially be able to buy miles as cheaply as 1.2 US cents per mile, which is pretty decent. If you have plans to travel on one of Air Canada’s partners, it might make sense to buy. It might also make sense to save your bank points and not transfer to Air Canada if you can get them cheaply.

Awesome award pricing on partners

Aeroplan is one of those programs that thankfully still maintains an award chart. The methodology is based on a combination of zones and distance between the origin and destination. But before we talk about the pricing, we should mention the award rules:

• Up to six flight segments are allowed per direction of travel.
• The total journey cannot exceed twice the non-stop distance between the origin and destination (backtracking is allowed). There may be an exception on short-distance flights without direct service.
• When destinations are in a single zone, you may not connect via a third zone. There may be an exception if the origin or destination borders two regions.
• Travel between:
  • Europe and North America must cross the Atlantic Ocean.
  • The Middle East and North America must cross the Atlantic Ocean.
  • North America and South America cannot touch another region.

A caveat on how United Airlines is priced

It’s important to note that United Airlines counts as a “Select Partner” on the Aeroplan award chart. That means they will engage in special pricing that starts at a base amount. It also means the program can stealthily hide devaluations and not announce them. Sneaky, sneaky.

Let’s take the example of flying SFO to EWR on United. If you follow the typical partner flight cost, it should be 12,500 miles. But using Air Canada miles will instead cost you 15,000 for this flight. (It’s 30,000 miles for business class.)

We’re seeing the following award costs appear for United flights within North America in economy:

• Flights <500 miles: 10,000 miles (other partners 6,000)
• Between 500 and 1,500 miles: 15,000 miles (other partners 10,000)
• Between 1,501 and 2,750 miles: 15,000 miles (other partners 12,500)
• Over 2,750 miles: 25,000 miles (other partners 22,500)

As you can see, they pushed up the pricing significantly on short-distance flights with United, which means we can no longer call this a sweet spot of the program.

Air Canada’s Star Alliance Pricing Beats United’s Star Alliance Pricing

But, it’s worth taking a step back to look at the bigger picture between Air Canada and United. In pretty much every meaningful comparison, Air Canada’s pricing on Star Alliance flights is better than United’s. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at a few sample routes:

• US to Asia: 110,000 miles in business class via United or 75,000-87,500 via Air Canada
• US to Europe: 88,000 miles in business class via United or 60,000-70,000 via Air Canada

Even in economy class, the story is similar:

• US to Asia: 60,500 miles in economy via United or 50,000-60,000 via Air Canada
• US to Europe: 44,000 miles in economy via United or 35,000-40,000 via Air Canada

Why would you consider using United miles? Perhaps you want to fly United metal (they offer a cheaper price on their own flights). Or maybe you like the parties they throw. The opportunities to get substantial value for United miles is running out, which is why I wonder why people value Chase Ultimate Rewards so highly. (It has to be Hyatt.)

Sweet spots with Air Canada miles

What are some of the best award deals in this chart?

Flights to and within Asia and Oceania

If you’re looking for a good value within Asia, check out Tokyo to Sydney for only 45,000 miles in business, 60,000 miles in first. This comes in handy if you don’t have AA miles on that same route. Where this beats AA is the ability to potentially add a stopover along the way.

How about getting down to Australia? It’s extremely difficult to get to Australia directly from the US. Instead, consider routing yourself through Asia (such via Singapore) and have an easier time with award space. Sure, that could cost more than flying directly, but at 115,000 miles in business class plus a potential stopover, the pricing certainly isn’t bad.

Europe for as little as 60,000 miles in business

East Coast US to Europe only comes in at 60,000 miles in business. This includes the excellent Singapore Airlines on the JFK to FRA route. Of course, since award pricing doesn’t incur fuel surcharges, you can take any of the European carriers and not be stuck with a fee.

Pricing in first class could be as cheap as 90,000 miles on shorter hops, but more than likely a connection and other marginally longer flights (like IAD-FRA) will push you into the 100,000 mile range.

West Coast US to Europe is theoretically possible for only 10,000 miles more to either cost, but good luck finding the award space in advance.

Cheap Stopovers

One thing I absolutely love is when I can piece together multiple destinations on an award trip for an efficient price. Sure, the old round-the-world style bookings were nice back in the day, but most programs got rid of those. Instead, I’ve been looking more for programs that offer a stopover along the way. Recall that a stopover is defined as a stay that’s longer than 24 hours on an international journey. Air Canada provides an example of a stopover on their website:

Here the assumption is that you’ll want to spend a few weeks in Frankfurt, Germany, perhaps taking the train to explore other German cities. In any event, Air Canada only charges 5,000 miles to allow you for the stopover. You’ll find some relevant rules on their website:

• One stopover is allowed per direction of travel.
• Stopovers cannot be longer than 45 days.
• Stopovers cannot be in the US or Canada. They don’t want you to convert this into two separate vacations.

One last thing to note is that you’ll want to make sure award flights are available on the days you’re flying. Air Canada is not going to magically make new award space appear for you. So ideally you would search for award flights first on your preferred dates of travel, and then combine it together to book your award flight with the stopover after you confirmed availability.

One of the best infant award ticketing policies

Back when we flew internationally with an infant, we ended up sometimes paying a pretty penny to allow our child to sit in our lap. Without getting into the debate on the safety of the lap child, I can say it sometimes got expensive.

With most airlines, you would be forced to pay 10% of the cash price of the ticket. Say you found a flight for 75,000 miles in business class one-way. But if you want to bring your lap infant, you’d have to pay 10% of the cash fare, which could be thousands of dollars. A one-way flight is painfully priced high, and you might pay less if doing a roundtrip, but it’s still quite a dent. I’d say the rough average of what we paid for an infant was around $600 for the ticket.

But what about Air Canada? The program only charges $25CA or 2,500 Aeroplan points for the lap child. This applies regardless of the cabin booked. Talk about a cost-effective way to bring along your pint-sized loved one! That ranks it as one of the absolute best programs for your infants and one that I would tell parents to go check out.

How to best search for availability?

I find Air Canada’s website is generally fairly easy to use, especially when it comes to using your points. Just enter your dates and select that you want to use your Aeroplan points to see what pops up. In the example below, you’ll find that here you’ll find pricing for four seats in Lufthansa first class.

Importantly, Air Canada has access to different award space than other Star Alliance partners may have. For example, they have access to more flights on Singapore Airlines than others may have. So while you might like the calendar view available on United’s website, you might not pick up flights bookable by Air Canada.

Booking your free stopover is pretty easy on the Air Canada website. Just choose the “Multi-city/Stopover” option and fill in your details. Under the “1 Adult” dropdown, you can also easily expand your search to include a lap infant.

Additionally, you can use the free point.me tool too to analyze award space.

Do Miles Expire?

Yes, miles expire after 18 months if there is no activity in your account. But the good thing is it’s easy to just earn one point to keep your account active.

Anything else?

At one point, Air Canada allowed a Family Sharing option that allowed members of a family to pool their points together for awards. However, this option was taken down (I imagine due to fraud or abuse). It would be nice to see it come back, even if just for elite members. I like it when programs offer a way for members of a family to work together to fund travel. That makes it easier when transferring points in from each person’s credit card program. Or it can also help with cleaning up the leftover scraps each person might have from other qualifying activity (like flights).