Air Canada Aeroplan is updating its award chart effective March 25th, so there’s almost two months’ notice. And nothing is changing with their partner redemption chart prices. There’s good and bad here in my view for what they’re now calling the ‘Air Canada and Select Partners’ award table.

• The partner award chart has fixed prices. Available awards should always price the same.
  
• Air Canada awards have variable prices, and access to a whole lot more inventory. You can book any seat you wish, but you’ll pay a premium to do so.
  
• More airlines will join the variable price chart (‘Select Partners’)

This chart will cover Air Canada, United, Emirates and Flydubai (which currently have their own, more expensive chart), Etihad, and Canadian regional airlines Calm Air, Canadian North, and Provincial Airlines.

With higher, variable pricing on Etihad will come a return of access to Etihad business class awards (first class availability won’t change).

It’s unclear what variable pricing will look like in terms of additional inventory for United. Air Canada and United are joint venture partners. I assume they’re moving onto this chart because Aeroplan will be able to access more United space beyond just saver inventory – which is actually huge for the U.S. market considering Aeroplan as a better frequent flyer program option than MileagePlus (and Aeroplan is a transfer partner with Chase, Amex, Capital One and Bilt and has their own U.S. co-brand credit card from Chase).

Here’s what I don’t like about this change:

• The new Air Canada and Select Partners chart will get ride of the published ‘price range’ and publish a ‘starting at’ price (which doesn’t change from the current starting price) and a ‘median price’ which Aeroplan says will be based on historical redemption data, updated quarterly based on trailing 12 months of data.

• That’s useful information! But they’re dropping the maximum price from the chart. They could have chosen to add median without eliminating a published maximum.

• First class awards won’t show medians and neither will regions outside of North America.

Aeroplan Elite members and co-brand credit card customers will be eligible for discounts on redemptions which fall under this charge, which is a broadening of the benefit.

Air Canada is not changing their partner award chart. They still have an award chart. And they’re offering more award inventory than before with these changes. I take them overall to be good – I just wish they’d continue to public maximum prices.

And since price ranges are going to vary still with some of these airlines it would be nice to see more granular pricing for each. Just not publishing an Emirates award chart anymore isn’t necessarily helpful, unless award pricing on Emirates is like pricing on United since they’ll be on the same chart.