Many of you have complained about the difficulty in securing a free seat when you have gone to make your holiday plans. In fact, it has been common to find no space available unless you have booked your reward flights at least 8 to 10 months in advance. Complicating this scenario have been a seemingly bizarre number of restrictions, blackouts, and rules that have further dismayed potential travellers, along with a seemingly skimpy inventory of redeemable seats.

Earlier this past winter season the C.I.B.C Aerogold visa card along with Aeroplan distributed free companion fare vouchers for members who bought a ticket from Air Canada. Ostensibly, this would give one a free ticket for a friend or relative if you bought a ticket yourself. Unfortunately, the "fine print" requires you to pay the full economy or business class fare, not any special excursion or seat sale fares! If you were travelling to London, England for example, a full economy fare would cost approximately $2900.00 as opposed to sale priced or excursion fares for $900.00 per person. Not particularly good value, unless you usually travel in business class. In case you wondered, a round trip business class fare to London from Toronto would be $5988.00 plus tax. Therefore two of you could travel for $3000.00 each!

Late last month Air Canada announced that it was adding on millions of seats for their frequent flyers. This act of corporate largesse may not be as good it sounds. Aeroplan has said that it is eliminating black out periods and making 15 per cent of all Air Canada’s seats available for reward seats on each route as opposed to 10 per cent previously. However, only about 8 per cent of these seats will be available at the traditional reward levels. When these are booked, customers must pay a premium of anywhere from 33 per cent to 50 per cent more points if you wish to have these "Avenue" category seats accessible. This means that if you want a flight to Vancouver for the "Classic" number of points - 25,000, and that inventory has been sold out, you can now use 37,500 points to get the same seat under the "Avenue" program. Seems like a bit of smoke and mirrors to me in order to raise the number of points you need to fly free! Just another reason why our national carrier tries hard to be the one we love to hate!

Best Regards.

Darcy Flarity