Air Canada, TD, CIBC, Visa and Aimia Reach New Agreement
After some more back and forth, it looks like Aeroplan is finally being bought out by the Air Canada, TD, CIBC, Visa consortium. Looks like me that Aimia was not happy with the initial offer that they rejected at the beginning of the month.
The transaction is obviously not final yet, but the current agreed purchase price is $450 million in cash and the assumption of approximately $1.9 billion of Aeroplan Miles liability.
Thoughts
So where does this leave Porter and Air Transat? The death of the valuable transferable miles option?
My initial thought as a consumer is huge disappointment. I would have much rather Aeroplan team up with Porter and Air Transat, to compete with Air Canada’s new program. I cannot see how this move helps increase the competition in the Canadian market. It gives Air Canada too much market share and decreases their incentive to improve their program.
As a business move, this probably makes more sense for Aimia and Air Canada, so that they do not have to go through so much restructuring.
Either way, my hope is that this will benefit consumers in the long run, but it is difficult to be optimistic at the moment. I hope that I am very wrong this time.
I’m more curious what will happen to the aeroplan amex
May only find out closer to June 2020.
Does this mean that Air Canada just bought VIPorter? Or did Porter have an out clause in case this happened?
I think this may mean that Porter is out of the picture. Let’s see how this plays out.
I was always suspicious of why Air Canada announced their new program so far in advance. I also wondered if they actually ever planned to introduce their own program.
More and more as this has evolved, I think they did it to shake confidence in and destabilize Aeroplan. Personally I cashed out a significant number of points into primarily hotel gift cards to ensure I got some value, if Aeroplan did fail. I know many other people who did similar, reducing the point liability. Thing is, if Air Canada ACTUALLY was going to proceed with its own program, no details ever came forth and then the consortium news.
There are so many changes on the fly. Yikes!