air canada's "earn your wings" challenge -- yvr-sea just became so much more rewarding

air canada has a new promotion called "earn your wings". for this promotion, certain flights let you earn "wings". you earn 100 wings for every time you take off or land at an airport serviced by air canada on an air canada marketed flight. you also get bonus wings for earning badges. there are certain criteria for these badges, for instance, arriving at a certain airport, or hitting a certain combination of airports between the promo period. only flights booked and completed from april 11 - june 16 count. registration is required.

the real value of these wings is that for every 2,000 wings you earn, you will get 1,000 aeroplan points. and for every 10,000 wings, you'll get a bonus 5,000 aeroplan points on top of that.

this promotion has led to great discussion on flyertalk about how to best maximize this promotion. one of the strategies was to use the yvr-sea route. both airports are heavily bonused in this promotion, which may have been unintentional by air canada, and remains highly lucrative.

YVR-YYJ-YVR-SEA-YVR same day trip, may 11, 2013, is selling for $453 all in. this is a flex fare (except for YVR-YYJ, which is tango), and so one will earn 750 status and 63 non-status miles. the real value is in the wings you earn in this promotion:

200 points for talking about this on social media
100 wings for taking off at YVR
100 wings for landing in YYJ (victoria)
100 wings for taking off at YYJ
100 wings for landing in YVR
100 wings for taking off from YVR
100 wings for landing in SEA
100 wings for taking off from SEA
100 wings for landing in YVR
500 wings for taking off specifically at YVR (the YVR badge)
500 wings for landing at YYJ (the YYJ badge)
500 wings for taking off at YYJ (the YYJ badge)
500 wings for landing at YVR (the YVR badge)
500 wings for taking off at YVR (the YVR badge)
1000 wings for landing at SEA (the SEA badge)
1000 wings for taking off at SEA (the SEA badge)
500 wings for landing at YVR (the YVR badge)
5000 wings for flying YVR-SEA (the TCA badge can only be earned once)
5000 wings for touching down at YVR (the olympic badge can only be earned once)
5000 wings for 3 take off/landings at SEA/YVR/YYJ (the pacific coast badge)
5000 wings for 3 take off/landings at SEA/YVR/YYJ (the pacific coast badge)

your total is 26,000 wings. under the rules, you would earn 13,000 points for having 13 x 2,000 wings, and 10,000 points for earning 2 x 10,000 wings. this means a net total of 23,000 bonus aeroplan points. for the entire trip, you will earn 23,813 aeroplan points. the cost per point is 1.89c/point. they recently changed some of the rules so that you can only earn some of the 5,000 wing badges once ... so before their correction, you could have earned tens of thousands more wings than before. for comparison sake, if you were to buy top up points from air canada, they would charge you 3.15c/point.

(by the way, if you just did a YVR-SEA run, you would have earned 13,400 wings, 11,000 bonus aeroplan points, or 11,500 aeroplan points in total for $371. the cost per point is 3.23c/point).

is this worthwhile? it simply depends on how much you value an aeroplan point. if you value your aeroplan point at 1.26c per point, those 22,813 points earned from this promo will only be worth $287 -- a net loss. if you value these points at 6c each, these same points will be worth $1,369 ... very worthwhile for its cost. the true value is somewhere in between. of course, you have to factor in the cost of a day's worth of travel as well. make sure you eat your meals in the lounge.

i won't lie: i'm kind of tempted.