Chart Topping - Maximizing Flight Charts

With all the focus on using points for long haul luxury travel, it can leave some people wondering what options are available for them when travelling in economy. Rising ticket prices can leave your wallet feeling lightweight, particularly if you have a large family or lack the luxury of being able to be flexible. This is part of a series focused on optimizing points for economy travel, with this article focusing on getting the most out of flight charts with your Avion, Amex, or Aventura points - Aeroplan need not apply as this isn't an available redemption option.

If you're already familiar with "base casing", and Know Your Options with the points you hold, then jump ahead to compare flight charts, review some cases, and see my main lessons.

Note that I do not currently hold an Aventura card so I can only talk about it based on published info, and I can not test live flight availability/pricing. If you have one and want to help me add some info to the article please reach out, otherwise I will update it once I can fit an Aventura card into my plan.

Referrals and Disclaimers at the bottom.

Consider Your Base Case

This advice applies whether looking for economy shorthaul, longhaul business, or anywhere in-between. It is critical to understand what you would do if you didn't have any points as it will help you quantify how much benefit points are getting you. This in turn will let you consider if you are meeting a reasonable benchmark value for your points. Point bookings are typically analogous to economy standard, but if you would have flown economy basic, you aren't "saving" the price of a standard fare, you're "saving" the price of a basic fare and "gaining" the benefit of a better fare class (which you may not value!).

Which airline would you have flown with? If you would have flown with the cheapest airline (eg. Flair), then an AC flight on points isn't "saving" you the price of the AC ticket persay.

The same applies to departure time - if the point price is the same for every time of day, allowing you to pick your favourite time, what is the value gained? Would you have booked your favourite time regardless or would you have picked the cheapest time? You also need to consider why you are going on this trip. Is it something inflexible like a wedding, family get together, etc? Or is it a leisure trip that could shift in date/destination as needed? If you wanted to go to London but found an amazing point deal to Dublin, is that irrelevant or are you now changing your destination happily? There are so many questions like this, and I don't expect you to formally consider them all, but imagine that it could be very difficult to articulate how much you are saving when you are comparing a direct flight on WJ leaving at 10pm in economy basic vs a connecting flight on AC leaving at 5pm on economy standard. Finally I want to emphasize that if your base case is a very cheap flight, there's a greater chance that you might be better off saving your points for another time.

Know Your Options

Knowing the options available to you with the points you have available will be key in optimizing your points.

If you have a point that can only be used at a fixed value such as TD travel points and Scene+ points, for better or worse there is nothing to optimize, just use them at their fixed value. In a similar vein, a pure variable point such as Aeroplan will be beholden to the typical tricks for optimizing a variable value redemption. But what if you have a hybrid point that can be used in multiple ways such as Avion, Amex, or Aventura points?

All three of these points can be used at a fixed value of 1 cent each, and this can certainly be considered a floor value, but it is far from the only way to use them. Avion and Amex points are also transferrable points, a feature we've discussed before but will expand on for economy travel in our next article. But what about an option in between the two?

*Note: the transferability of Avion and Amex for economy travel will be covered in a subsequent article.

Variable Value - Flight Charts

Flight charts are a relatively common form of variable value points with a capped upside. Avion, Aventura, and Amex MR can all be used this way in addition to other options. Note: we like to focus on the value of the points and use the term "variable value points" whereas many credit card companies like to focus on the number of points and call this "fixed points travel" or similar.

Understanding how these charts work will help you know when they are likely to be valuable. They divide up travel into a series of different regions/route types like short haul domestic vs sun destinations vs europe and so forth. Within each trip type they define a set number of points with a maximum potential value. The best case value for your points is if the ticket price happens to be close to but over the maximum. Just divide the max price by the number of points to find out the best case cent per point value:

Avion is the clear winner for having every option worth a maximum of 2c or more. Furthermore their shortest distance category (Quick Getaways) is far more flexible in routes than Amex (Popular Routes). Aventura gets second place with an edge for short haul, increased flexibility with its point ranges, but falling short with flights outside of Canada/US having lower max values per point

There is an important wrinkle however with these charts, the "max ticket price" they are referring to is not total price you see advertised, but rather excludes taxes and fees. Imagine you had a flight in the Avion 45k "Holiday Desinations" category that cost $978, you might think that you could use 45k pts to cover $900 and pay the remaining $78 with cash. But instead you see it priced at 45k + $317, what the heck??!! is Avion ripping us off? No, not quite.

Because the the base fare is only $661, instead of getting our expected 2c of saving per point, we only saved $661/45k = 1.47c. Still better than using our Avion points at 1c each, but not as good as we hoped.

Let's work through some cases to see how to get good value and discuss some quirks and limitations here

Case 1 - Expensive Short Haul Round trip and exploring fare availability and pricing differences

Case 2 - Low cost international one way and exploring ways to maximize value

Case 3 - International one way trip

Case 1 - Expensive Short Haul Round Trip

YYZ-MKE - base case is round trip, single connection (no direct exists currently), operated by AC/UA ideally, and in economy standard. Flexible departure days within the month but some preference for mid day flights on Sunday. Lets check the cash price, we find an 11am Sunday flight with AC with the following price breakdown:

This scenario of an expensive flight to an adjacent state favours Avion, with Aventura second and Amex a distant third

From the charts we expect:

Amex - 20k points for $300 off - 1.5cpp Avion - 15k points for $350 off - 2.14cpp Aventura - 20k points for $400 off - 2cpp

Simple right? So we'd expect to find this ticket for 15k + ~$520 on Avion, 20k + ~570 on Amex etc. but we hit our first issue when checking the prices

In this case for Avion

Why is it ~$230 more than we expected, saving a measily $110 for 15k points (lower than the 1cpp we could get if we wanted). It looks like Avion is taking $350 off a flight that costs ~$1100 instead of $870.

Ok lets check Amex, but wait a minute, when I sort by departure time I don't see the 11am departure at all! Just 9am and 2pm.

What's happening here? Different price on Avion, and not available on Amex? Well the devil is in the details of airline pricing. Availability of various fare classes, and their pricing is not guaranteed to be equal across the programs.

Air Canada, like most airlines, not only has different pricing for economy vs business; and not only for economy basic vs economy standard etc; but also based on how many seats are sold within each fare class and through which channel. If we go back to AC and look closer we will note that for economy standard on the flight there there was 1 seat left at this price we saw.

And when we bump the seats up to 2 we see that the ticket price jumps up to 1187.27 per person, pretty close to the implicit ~$1100 per person we saw through Avion, and if we use an aggregator like Google flights we find that this flight is available around this price across various sites.

So what's the lesson here? Despite Avion having the best discount in this setting, sometimes the pricing is sufficiently different that the savings are eaten up, particularly when there is a limited number of discounted seats available.

But this isn't always a bad thing. Eagle-eyed readers will note that I said the AC price was ~1187 per person when booking 2 people, but the Avion price was ~1100 when booking 1 - so what if we needed 2 tickets? First lets price with AC

Lets compare to Avion

We'd expect Avion to cost 1674.54 + 30k pts for two tickets based on the above AC pricing, but it actually came out to $1511.54 + 30k. So it was significantly more than expected when searching for 1 ticket, and moderately less than expected when searching for 2 - the take away? Different availability and pricing of tickets on the various platforms can either worsen or improve your savings. In this case while the points saved us $700, we saved another ~$160 just in difference in pricing. By going on Avion to use our points we saved ~860 total which would appear to be 2.87cpp (higher than the flight chart max) if we didn't know the fare was different. Amex Platinum card holders will frequently see ~5% off public fares which can improve the realized return on your points by using their portal.

Case 2 - International Round Trip

YVR-Tokyo - Base case of a direct flight, as cheap as possible, any date, any carrier, hoping for about 2 week trip, leaving "soon".

I started with Google flights and the relevant filters and poked around until I found availability on Zipair at an amazing price.

From the charts we expect:

Avion - 100k points for up to $2000 off - max 2cpp

Amex - 100k points for $1700 off - max 1.7cpp

Aventura - 75-125k points for $1200-$2000 off - max 1.6cpp

Since the base fare is well below the maximum covered, we would anticipate the final cost to be the points plus the remaining taxes and fees, for eg. 100k avion + $102.81, an abysmal 0.8cpp. Aventura performs slightly better allowing 75k to be redeemed giving slightly better 1.07cpp. Aventura performs better for cheaper flights given its redemption ranges. Regardless of this theory, when we go to check we find the next quirk of flight charts - airline availability.

You'll notice that Zipair is absent from the list, so even if we wanted to use our points for this flight we could not. Not all carriers, particularly some budget ones, are available on every platform.

For the sake of discussion, lets look at a traditional carrier available through Avion (as well as Amex and Aventura), the cheapest in this case was JAL:

Unfortunately a significant portion of the ticket price is in surcharges and taxes, and as such we would expect sub maximal value with our points. Again, due to the low cost, Aventura performs better with 75k to save $963 for 1.28cpp, vs 100k Amex or Avion giving a 0.96cpp and in any case leaving ~$640 in taxes and fees.

Does this mean we shouldn't bother with Avion and Amex? Well that depends on your priorities, because we could also take advantage of the fact that we could cover a ticket that is ~$1000 more expensive. For example, if we instead search for the cheapest premium economy ticket we find a great price on similar days with ANA

To our great fortune we find the same pricing/availability on Avion - this is the holy grail, a ticket just barely over the max amount covered. This means we can get $2000 off for 100k Avion, giving us a final price of 100k + $651, only about $10 more than the economy ticket on JL with Avion points. The tip here is that if your base fare is significantly under the maximum allowed for a given flight chart category, consider how you can upgrade your flight to take better advantage of it and if you would consider that good value. This could be a better departure date or time, more direct route, or fare class that is more favourable (includes checked bags, extra leg room etc).

In this example if you truly didn't care about class of travel, the savings with Avion and Amex are poor, but if you value more comfort, you can get 2cpp with avion on this route. If you would have flown Zipair economy however, you'd be better off paying $911 cash instead of using a flight chart as the "best" option Aventura would be 75k points and $640 arguably only saving you $270 (only 0.36cpp!!!) from your base case.

Case 3 - One way trip

YUL-IST - base case of a direct one way flight, dates inflexible due to a wedding, part of a complex itinerary that favours piecing together separate oneways and/or multicity booking.

In this case Amex and Aventura can't contribute at all as they only work with round trips, so Avion is the clear winner, and we excpect:

Avion - 32.5k for$650 off - 2cpp

Based on the above pricing we would have expected $674.11 between remaining base fare and the surcharges and fees. But fare pricing/availability once again factors in.

Despite our expectations we see $716.44 for the remaining cost. Avion had a higher ticket price, so we were saving $650 off of a ticket that they priced ~$42 higher eating up some of our savings. This gives an effective savings of $607.67 or 1.87cpp which I would consider pretty good if we were genuinely considering paying cash for this flight.

Summary of Lessons

Best value is with expensive base fares - the base fare needs to be at or over the maximum amount covered to get the maximum CPP, this is more likely to occur with on peak or last minute travel.

Different availability and pricing of tickets on the various platforms can either worsen or improve your savings - the only way to know how this will play out is to check and there seems to be little rhyme or reason to it

Not all carriers, particularly some budget ones, are available on every platform - so if you truly were going to fly an ultra low cost option, you might be saving less than you'd hope by being "forced" to fly a traditional carrier

If your base fare is significantly under the maximum allowed for a given flight chart category, consider how you can upgrade your flight - Since the out of pocket price doesn't change up to the max covered ticket price, you can select better departure time, route, seats, cancellation terms, or class of flight in some circumstances, enhancing the value you obtain

Avion has the highest overall value and greatest flexibility by allowing round trips and any fare class

Amex often has discounted fares and provides alternative business class flight chart which allows larger point totals for higher amounts of max fee - While the cpp is lower than Avion, to minimize your cash outlay you may prefer this option. For example for a Business class ticket with $4500 base fare + $500 fee ticket you might rather spend 250k Amex + $500 Amex (1.8cpp) instead of 100k Avion + $3500 (2cpp) to minimize your out of pocket despite

Aventura has some flexibility which can be useful for lower cost fares - despite lower cpp's in many categories this increases the circumstances you may get acceptable point value.

Conclusion

If you only have Aventura points this is the final step in your economy optimization as your options are cash, 1cpp fixed value, or flight chart (unless you've been holding the card since the early 2010s in which case you should be grandfathered in to the ability to transfer your points to Aeroplan points).

The additional ability to transfer Avion and Amex points provides one more step to consider in their cases. There are 3 more articles planned in this series, one on using airline points/transfer partners, one on companion passes (premium Aeroplan cards from TD and Amex, WestJet, Porter, and British Airways) and one putting it all together into a practical and systematic approach to save on economy travel

Avion is my overall favourite flight chart program. If you want to get started with the Avion ecosystem I'd first grab the Avion VI as it has an elevated offer until June 11th 2025. If you find yourself getting good value with Avion's flight chart and want to increase your ongoing earning, add on the ion+ card. With a monthly fee of $4 this card earns points 3 times as fast as the Avion Visa Infinite in categories like food and gas. You can then transfer those points to the Avion VI to use them with the flight chart or transfer them further to Avion's partners. Until May 14th the ion+ has a welcome bonus of 14k points, almost enough for the 15k "Quick Getaway" option which can cover a ticket up to $350. The higher earn rates help solidify Avion into my top tier flight chart slot with it's high cpp potential and support for one way bookings. Despite my overall impression of the flight charts, the incredible earn rate of the Amex Cobalt and the multitude of other ways to use Amex MRs means it's still my overall preferred program (the business class flight chart and discounted fares don't hurt too). I also have a new appreciation for Aventura for low cost flights and thanks to it's redemption ranges - just keep in mind that it's slow earn rate and lack of transferability ultimately keep it in a far lower ranking.

Referrals

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If you're on the fence, or wondering about other cards reach out to me for a free consult, and if you sign up for a card through my link, let me know and I will walk you through advanced tricks and personalized advice to help you get the maximum benefit both from earning and redeeming points - getting your travel journey going faster than you ever thought possible.

Check out my Keeper Cards series to see other cards worth exploring

Disclaimer

This should not be taken as financial advice and details are subject to change. I have made good intentioned efforts to be accurate but ultimately consult card terms and conditions