booking an aeroplan reward ticket to asia: process, calculations, and business class seats

there was a recent need to make a booking to singapore in february of next year, and so i went on the hunt for tickets. i was debating between whether i wanted to make this a revenue ticket (i.e., you pay for your flight), or make this a reward ticket (i.e., using your aeroplan points). so i'm just detailing my thought process in how these tickets came to be booked.

note that this is a bit of a complicated itinerary. i was departing from one city on the outbound leg, and on the return leg, i wanted to terminate at a different city. also, my dates were fixed with little flexibility. and of course, this is during the high season of travel to asia -- it is right in the middle of chinese new year.

step 1: do i need a revenue ticket for the status miles?
the first challenge was deciding whether to make this a reward booking or a revenue booking. the absolute cost was not an issue, but it was whether the points that could have been earned on this trip were actually needed in maintaining status. the itineraries that i could pull from united could potentially give me 19,000 points. 19,000 elite qualifying points in asiana airlines' asiana club goes a long way -- that's almost like instant star silver status with them.

i need an additional 19,000 points by november 2014 to maintain my star gold status, but i'm pretty sure that i can make it without these 19,000 points. so in this case, a reward ticket was a good possibility.

step 2: what is the cost of an economy fare -- can i afford it?
my second step was to see whether it was even worth it. i would be starting my journey from YXU (london, ontario) to SIN (singapore). on the return, i wanted to end the journey in YVR (vancouver, bc). a sample itinerary purely on united: good timing, newer aircraft (not their old 747s), $1,316 in economy class.

i looked briefly at singapore airlines, although this turned out to be almost $2,000. i really like air canada's hard product even in economy, but given their new tango and flex fares that will only credit 50% to asiana's program, air canada was out of the running. $1,316 on united was definitely affordable.

step 3: what is the value of booking an economy reward ticket?
under aeroplan's program, a trip to asia would cost 75,000 points in economy plus taxes. availability was great in economy for the inflexible dates that i had. taxes for a similar itinerary priced out at $323. if i had priced a reward ticket flying on air canada with its better hard product, the taxes would be higher as i would have to pay more fuel surcharges.

in this particular case, i would be spending 75,000 for a $993 ticket ($1316 - $323). this means that each point is worth 1.324c. i can typically get a better return on north american domestic tickets than this.

step 4: are business class rewards available?
the next step was to check out business class availability. for this particular trip to singapore, they want 125,000 points round trip. it's a substantial increase, but it's for business class.

plugging through their list of choices, it's frustrating because the search engine throws you these really awful choices. the rule is that the number of points needed is based on the highest class of travel in any segment of the itinerary. so even a single business segment amongst a bunch of other economy segments will push the overall cost up to 125,000 points, as if you were flying the entire itinerary in business. it's fair, of course, as those are the rules. but for them to place those options so prominently at the top of the search results is almost insulting.

this should not be one of the first few search result returns, yet it is ...

luckily for me, a few results below, hidden in the rest, was a business class option for united airlines. united's business class product is not necessarily my first choice, but it maximized the number of business class segments on my departure leg. and it flew from ORD (chicago, illinois) to SIN with a single stop in HKG (hong kong) on the same flight number, which is extremely convenient as there is no worry about a missed connection.

there is no real business class option leaving YXU

on the return, i couldn't find anything quite as sweet. there were no pure business class tickets. so my focus was finding a business class segment across the ocean. the rest was filler. air canada had plenty of availability from PEK (beijing, chin) to YVR, but there was nothing in business class from SIN to PEK. and yes, i could have probably found something if i had multiple, multiple connections, but that wasn't worth my time. so i was given the choice between taking shenzhen airlines up to PEK (one stop in shenzhen) or taking singapore airlines and air china to HKG and then to PEK. i've never tried shenzhen airlines, but it's apparently a 3-star airline compared to singapore airlines. so i went with the singapore airlines' 5-star routing instead.

it's hard to say "no" to the kebaya clad flight attendants ...

they wanted $323 in fees, including $190 in fuel surcharges, which is most likely from the air canada business class leg. and just to make sure that you understand that there is no chance for upgrading the economy segments (despite paying business class points), they include this friendly note:

step 5: calculating the return on the business class reward
i tried to price out the cost of this ticket. it's hard to do exact comparisons because the return leg is filled with stops that wouldn't necessarily happen if i were to book revenue tickets. on the united airlines website, the YXU-ORD-HKG-SIN leg was exactly the same. i chose a return itinerary that was somewhat more reflective of what i got via rewards:

in this particular situation, the transpacific portion is on ANA, which would most likely have a better hard product and definitely a better soft product than united. it would be on par with the air canada business class segment across the pacific (both being four-star airlines).

united's price for this ticket was $6530. whether i would actually pay that much is debatable, but the official asking price is as above. in the reward that i got, i would estimate that 40% of the return leg was in economy. if we were to consider the return leg to be half the price, and if we were to consider the fact that the $1316 economy ticket that i was willing to buy in economy is 5x cheaper, then i would estimate the real value of what i booked to be worth $3265 (departure) + $3265x60% (transpacific return) + $3265 x 40%/5 (economy return segments) = $5482. again, it's debatable if i would actually pay this much to travel.

because i paid $323 in taxes on my reward flight, it means that by using 125,000 aeroplan points, i actually saved $5159. this means that each of my aeroplan points was worth 4.13 cents per point. i considered this a decent haul.

it was an even better haul for me because the majority of these points were accrued using the starwood preferred guest american express. i also transferred the points into my aeroplan account during their transfer bonus. so by having transferred 80,000 points (which represents $80,000 in spending), i received 125,000 aeroplan points. therefore, each dollar spent on that american express card gave me a return of 6.45 cents. even if i truly valued the business class tickets at half their actual cost, each aeroplan point would have been worth 2.07 cents, and each starwood point would have been worth 3.23 points.

step 5: to book or not to book?
it was worth it to me. and it would mean finally clearing out my aeroplan account. and so it was booked.