Air Canada Aeroplan is one of my favorite award programs because they have tons of sweet spots like business class to Asia for 75,000 miles one way. However because this program is so valuable, the competition for these award seats is often very high. Luckily there’s an easy trick that will help you get a leg up on the competition. Let’s get right into it.
Air Canada Aeroplan Default Search Capabilities
Currently, Air Canada’s calendar date picker lets you pick a date that is 354 days away from today. As you can see, the furthest date that I can select from today is February 11, 2025.
If we search for this date, we can see some pretty good availability for Singapore Airlines and Eva Air business class from Los Angeles to Singapore.
However, we can actually search and book award flights even further out than this.
How To See Extended Availability on Air Canada Aeroplan
To go beyond this 354-day limit, you have to be on your desktop and search the furthest date out the website will let you. This will show you the view in the screenshot above. Once here, you can now click the date boxes in the mini calendar at the top of the page.
Clicking on these dates will now allow you to view the availability for those dates! As you can see, I can see all of the flight options departing on February 12.
The big benefit of this is that you can get first access to those award seats before others who don’t know about this trick. With this trick, you can search and book availability up to 361 days out! In my example, the furthest I could go was 2/18. Going beyond that caused the website to error out and take me back to the original search screen. The interesting thing is that if you get taken back to the search page, the date will be preset to what you last searched and the dates 354 days out and onwards are unable to be selected.
Limitations Of Viewing Extended Aeroplan Award Availability
The one caveat to this trick is that not all partner airlines will release award availability that far in advance. For example, if I go to 2/17, which is 360 days out, I won’t see any award availability for Eva Air or Singapore Airlines even though they operate daily flights on that route.
However, if I go just 1 day earlier and search for flights on 2/16 (359 days out), I can see Eva Air availability.
Conclusion
Using this date trick, you can search for award availability on Aeroplan further out than you normally would be able to. This gives you a huge advantage over others when trying to book great awards. Just be wary that it may be too far in advance for some partner award availability to show up. Hopefully, you can use this trick to book some awesome flights!
What are some of your favorite award flights booked through Aeroplan?
