Transfers from Amex to Aeroplan are down

Travel
Doifoo
September 17, 2023
0
5 minutes read

Frustratingly, transfers from American Express Membership Rewards to Air Canada Aeroplan are not available right now and we don’t yet know of a timeline for them to return. This is obviously a big disappointment for Aeroplan fans. As I was looking to make an Aeroplan booking this week, I’ve been checking each day waiting for this to get resolved, but at this point I’m losing hope for a speedy solution.

I first saw this flagged yesterday morning in our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group. According to data points I dug up at Flyertalk and reddit, transfers from Amex to Aeroplan have been down since at least Tuesday, September 12th.

I would have initially expected this to be a short-term situation that might last for a few hours, that wasn’t the case here. Instead, Amex has removed Aeroplan from the list of transfer partner programs, with the only mention of the partnership on the transfer partner page being the error message shown above, which shows up at the top of the transfer partner page.

Aeroplan is among my favorite Amex transfer partners, and I had an award I wanted to book, so I am waiting anxiously for this one to return. That said, the way Amex has that error message up and removed Aeroplan from the main partner list makes me nervous that this issue is expected to take a long time to resolve. I hope I’m wrong about that and transfers come back very soon, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this lasts a while just based on the way Amex is displaying it.

There has been some weirdness with Star Alliance programs as of late. Turkish did not show any Star Alliance awards on their website for months (only relaunching them this week and of course with many flights missing that should be available to book), the LifeMiles website has been very glitchy on a good day (and for the past several days I have only been able to search for LifeMiles awards via the app), and now transfers to Air Canada are down. All that leads me to believe that this is most likely just an ongoing IT issue rather than foreshadowing any change in the partnership. I’m sure that the partnership will likely remain intact, but hopefully they restore these transfers soon.

Hopefully this is a case of an IT issue that can be resolved and we see transfers return, but in the meantime if you need Air Canada Aeroplan points, you’ll need to get them from Chase transfers, Citi transfers, Capital One transfers, or Bilt transfers.