Big bonus from Aeroplan: Great use of SPG / Marriott points

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Air Canada’s Aeroplan is currently offering a historical-high 35% transfer bonus when converting hotel points into airline miles. This transfer bonus was announced a couple of weeks ago and continues through August 21, 2017.

a screenshot of a hotel

The Deal

  • Convert hotel points into Aeroplan miles and receive a 35% more miles
  • Ends August 21, 2017
  • Direct link here

Best uses

As a reminder, here are Aeroplan’s hotel partners:

several logos of hotels and resorts

The transfer ratios from hotel programs aren’t very good for the most part. The exceptions are Starwood and Marriott.

Starwood offers 1:1 transfers to Aeroplan and adds a bonus of 5,000 miles any time you transfer 20,000 Starpoints. This means than 20K starpoints usually gets you 25K Aeroplan miles. With the 35% bonus, 20,000 Starpoints33,750 Aeroplan miles. That’s excellent as it is essentially about 1.69 miles per dollar spent on the SPG card.

The other best use of the transfer bonus would be with Marriott Rewards. Normally, Marriott Rewards points transfer at a very poor ratio of 10,000 Marriott points = 2,000 Aeroplan miles. Since you could convert 9,999 Marriott Rewards points to 3,333 SPG points and transfer them to Aeroplan 1:1 (in blocks of one thousand), it wouldn’t make sense to transfer a block of Marriott points — unless you’re using Marriott Travel Packages.

As mentioned in the new SPG Transfer Partner guide Greg posted about this morning (See: Starwood Transfers: Best, Rest, and the Secret Weapon), Marriott Travel Packages can be a great use of Marriott Rewards (and by extension Starpoints). Here is the chart for travel packages with Air Canada’s Aeroplan:

a table with numbers and a list of flights

As you can see, if you were to transfer 270,000 Marriott Rewards points, you would normally receive seven nights in a Category 1-5 hotel plus 120,000 Aeroplan miles. With the 35% extra miles, that will become 162,000 Aeroplan miles. That’s a fantastic deal. To put it in perspective, if you were to transfer 90,000 Starpoints to Aeroplan in 20K point blocks, you would only receive 148,500 Aeroplan miles with the bonus — and no hotel stay. Getting a full week at a Category 1-5 plus 162,000 miles is a stellar deal if you have the points. That’s enough points to get you round trip in business class almost anywhere in the world on Star Alliance carriers (though be aware of fuel surcharges on many partners).

a table with different airlines names

Bottom line

This is a great deal if you are either converting Starpoints or redeeming for a Marriott Travel Package. The points transferred from Marriott to Aeroplan in those travel packages count the same as any other hotel points and receive a 35% bonus just the same as if you only transferred a small quantity of points, making Travel Packages the best deal. I wouldn’t even bother to look at the other hotel point programs unless you just need to top off a very small number of Aeroplan miles or have hotel points that are going to expire unused.

H/T: One Mile at a Time

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