I recently made an award booking with Aeroplan, flying on Air Canada. The system automatically assigned me a middle seat (yuck!), so I went to Air Canada’s website to change my seat. For some weird reason, the system attempted to charge me to select a normal, non-privilege seat. Being the cheap guy that I am, I Tweeted Air Canada and got this response:
Many airlines offer complimentary hotels for stopovers or on arrival. For example, Point Me to the Plane recently wrote about United’s complimentary hotel option for arrivals at certain cities. Similarly, Air Canada offers a free hotel on a stopover if your connection is more than six hours in Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver. Your itinerary must include a flight that originates/arrives at a non-Canadian or USA city. This option is free for paid bookings in business class, premium economy, or on a latitude fare. Flex and Tango fares apparently get a discounted rate for the hotel.
With the holiday season, air travel is solidly booked, and some passengers will have disruptions in their travel plans because of routine airline overbooking. To maximize sales, airlines will sell more seats than they have available, with the knowledge that there’s a good chance some people won’t make it to the airport for their flight, misconnect, or otherwise won’t make their flight. This increases the chance that airplanes fly full, which increases airline revenue. Sometimes, their risk calculations are off, and there are more people wanting to fly than there are seats available. This means that the flight is “overbooked.” This article will explain what your options are if you’re departing from Canada on a Canadian airline, for both domestic and international itineraries.
If you have a lot of vacation time and a lot of miles, the Aeroplan around-the-world award might be for you. It allows great flexibility for travel, which maximizes the distance and number of destinations you can see over any other Aeroplan award type.
Although these aren't stunning fares, Ottawans will know how expensive flights to Asia are from Ottawa, and anything under the $900 mark is pretty good (darn Torontonians and their major international airport!!).
Right now, you can fly between Ottawa YOW and Singapore SIN; Ho Chi Minh City SGN; Bangkok BKK; Hong Kong HKG and Shanghai PVG for between $670-$740 round-trip, taxes included.
There's been a pretty good fare between Toronto YYZ to Dublin DUB floating around for awhile on Air Canada (Rouge). That deal has gotten even better though! Air Canada is having a holiday promotion for discount codes and free flights, called Gift Massive.
