With Aeroplan being so RTW-friendly on their return redemptions, it is only natural that the savvies, when booking a trip to East Asia, tend to route over different oceans. The reason for this is that besides having legitimate claim to the fact that you travel around the world, per the Aeroplan rules, you are allowed two stop-overs along the way – in addition to your destination, of course. The net result is that you can visit 3 places – and this is not counting any overnight stopovers you might have (or stopovers with a duration of less than 24 hours). Considering the maximum segment length is 16, if you were really serious and really didn’t mind flying a lot, you could technically visit 15 different locations, assuming flight availability. This is a little bit insane, and in my own redemptions I generally tend to stick to, at most, three or four – but sometimes you do not have a choice, as in the case of my friend who needed to be in Hong Kong right after New Year’s – a notoriously difficult routing. So I booked the following itinerary for him:
YUL-ORD-LHR-ZRH (overnight)-PEK-HKG (destination), HKG-TPE (overnight)-PVG (overnight)-NRT (stop), NRT-PEK (stop), PEK-YYZ-YUL. All in business class, 125,000 Aeroplan points per person, and $370 of taxes/fuel surcharges (where the bulk of it, probably around $200-$250 comes from the before-last leg, PEK-YYZ, which is on Air Canada. If we were able to route using any of the non-fuel surcharge airlines (as of this writing, China Airlines, United, Singapore and so on), his total cost would have probably been more in the $100-$150 range. Not bad for a round-the-world business class ticket, eh? 🙂
Although I think this is a little bit on the insane side as far as the number of segments (and as far as actually GETTING to somewhere as opposed to BEING there), he seems to be happy – all the better, then 🙂
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