If you’re going to reject a cash offer for one of your assets that’s great than your entire market cap before the offer, then you’d better have something else to announce. And it turns out that after Aimia rejected Air Canada’s offer to buy back Aeroplan they have just announced a relationship with Canada’s Porter Airlines.
Effective July 2020 when Aeroplan’s exclusive deal with Air Canada expires,
- Porter Airlines will award Aeroplan miles for flights
- Porter will make award seats available for redemption “offering up to 60% of seat inventory for the purchase of flights with Aeroplan Miles at fixed-rate prices.”
Credit: abdallahh, YUL – Montréal-P-E-Trudeau, via Wikimedia Commons
This gives Aeroplan an airline partner, but Porter Airlines is no Air Canada. They operate of a fleet of 29 Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 turboprops with 74 seats. They fly to 16 destinations in Canada and 7 in the United States (although half a dozen of their routes are seasonal). And it doesn’t appear that they’d even be the exclusive frequent flyer program for Porter, which presumably will continue to operate the VIPorter program.
It’s something, as talking to oneworld about some way to provide them with a customer base in Canada in exchange for a lifeline.
This worries me:
“”We’ve committed to our five million members that they will be able to choose any seat on any airline, anywhere, any time with the new Aeroplan program.”
Do you think Porter Airlines might have something up their sleeves? Rapid expansion, full codesharing with JetBlue, etc.?
Ugh.