I wish I had time today to deep dive all three of these, but I didn’t – and yet I want to make sure nobody misses these huge bits of news today.
In this article
Emirates x Air Canada Live
You can now earn and burn between Emirates and Air Canada’s Aeroplan program. You’ll even be able to book Emirates First Class with Aeroplan from early next year (that had been limited to just Qantas after changes in 2020).
There will be a separate award chart though, also next year, giving you a few weeks this year to lock in whatever Emirates awards you can find on the standard Aeroplan award chart. That said, I think you may need Emirates “Saver” level space to book on Aeroplan as Flex fares I eyes from JFK-MXP that had availability on Emirates Skywards was not available with Air Canada.
Frequent Miler does a nice deep dive here.
New Air France / KLM Flying Blue Award Chart and New Stopovers
It’s great to see an airline that had gotten rid of award charts actually bring back an award chart!
It doesn’t seem to change too juch as the chart shows minimum pricing and it still flexes up dynamically from there, but at least you know that 55k is the least you could expect to pay for a US-Europe one way in Business Class, for example.
You can now also book a free stopover, even on a one way, as long as the whole trip is on Air France and/or KLM metal and you book by phone. That basically means you can have a stop in Paris or Amsterdam (for the most part).
I like View from the Wing’s summary here.
JetBlue’s New Mosaic Elite Program
JetBlue is making a slew of changes for 2023 in their Mosaic program, adding a 4 tier level component. You can earn points both from flying and from credit card spend, as is becoming the new trend (which I actually quite like).
OMAAT breaks it down really well right here.
British Airways Reduces Surcharges on Awards
But they do increase the number of Avios required. Still, on balance, the savings in cash probably works out to a 2 cent per Avios value. In other words, it’s not quite as great as it sounds, but it’s close. This definitely should make Avios more valuable for long haul flights although still not my first choice.
Get a nice summary from God Save the Points here.
Alaska Can Now Book El Al Awards
You can see the earn rate here for crediting El Al to Alaska MileagePlan. Oddly, they haven’t published an award chart yet for booking El Al with Alaska miles, but JT Genter for AwardWallet did quite a bit of good detective work here.
Thoughts?
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