Quick tip: How to search for Air Canada Aeroplan award tickets

We recently wrote a post about Air Canada’s Aeroplan potentially offering greater availability on United airlines flights than United is. Over the past week, I’ve seen at least a dozen questions between various private groups, emails, comments, etc, wondering how to search for Aeroplan awards that are entirely within the US. The Air Canada site clearly isn’t intuitive in this regard because people are repeatedly reporting the error that you can not search for flights that have an origin and destination in the US.

That’s only true with paid tickets. I’m not an aviation law specialist, but I believe that Air Canada, a foreign carrier, selling you a paid ticket for travel that starts and ends in the United States would be what is known as cabotage. Thankfully, award tickets are not a problem. What is clearly a problem is Air Canada’s web design….because a lot of people are missing the toggle to choose to search in “points” rather than US$.

I don’t know if it is the color scheme or toggle that they use rather than a check box or something else that is causing the confusion, but clearly it doesn’t catch the eye. And I think Air Canada has noticed because I swear that toggle switch was red just a few days ago, indicating to me that they have already made an update. I still think it isn’t terribly clear, but hopefully those folks reading this post will know to look for it.

I know that my instinct is always to look for check box to use miles and so even though I know I’m going to Air Canada’s site to search for an award and I’m a fairly experienced award-booker, I have still hit that error more times than I would like to admit when I’ve put in the cities and forgotten to toggle the switch.

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