Region of Waterloo International Airport - YKF

[tomh009]

Air Canada is much worse than the US airlines for carrier surcharges. Part of it is due to the way they (Air Canada and Aeroplan) chose to structure Aeroplan as an independent entity, so that you  have to pay more taxes to redeem. But it's also just that Air Canada charges more surcharges.

Here's a fun exercise if you have points, though. Go try to redeem Aeroplan points for Air Canada international flights, and then try to redeem for United international flights. You'll see that it costs way, way less money to fly United on Air Canada points. Often it is sub-$100 for an international flight, and that is never the case with Air Canada.

It's even worse than that. Until a couple of years ago you could book the same flight to Europe using AP miles on either AC or a partner like LH or OS. Only AC had very high surcharges, something like $600 at AC but only $100 at LH or OS. Exactly the same flights. The only difference was the flight number (code-shared or not) and the carrier who issued the ticket. Then apparently AC caught on and "forced" their partners to impose the same surcharges, exactly the same down to the cent. Go figure.

Incidentally the article I linked to says that Swiss doesn't impose the gougecharge on AP reward flights. That doesn't make sense to me since they're owned by LH (who also owns OS.) But it's worth checking out on flights to ZRH. And if it's true then the savings of flying to ZRH make this an option even if your eventual destination is Munich, Innsbruck, etc.

Since AP and AC are separate corporate entities, I doubt AC could "force" the partners to do anything -- and they would gain little from that anyway.  All of this needs to be done based on the rules of *A.  But an airline can choose to charge the surcharges for reward tickets, and in that case they will need to be paid by the member, regardless of the FF plan.  More likely LH (owner of LX and OS, too) figured out that they can earn some extra revenue from those reward ticket surcharges.

UA may not charge any surcharges.  Yet when I book my next flight to Europe using AP, I'll still pay the fees in order to fly directly from Canada to Europe, avoid two US immigration line-ups, and avoid sitting on a UA plane for the better part of 20 hours.  But those are just my priorities.