Air Canada announced on Monday that it’s selling a 25% stake in Aeroplan to an investor group led by Blackstone and La Caisse, with two Canadian pension funds along for the ride, for C$2.5 billion. That prices the whole program at C$10 billion.
Sit with that number. Air Canada bought Aeroplan back in 2018 for roughly US$323 million. On paper, the loyalty program is now worth a meaningful chunk of what the entire airline is, planes included. If you ever needed proof that a modern airline is a points bank with a flying division attached, here’s a term sheet.
What actually changes
Today: nothing. Air Canada keeps operational control and a controlling interest, the proceeds go to paying down a US$1.2 billion bond and buying back shares, and the company says the member experience “will be unaffected.”
I believe them, for now, because the structure tells you where the pressure arrives later. Air Canada negotiated the right to buy the stake back between years five and eight at a formula that guarantees the investors a 6.5% annual return. Private equity does not accept a guaranteed return and then leave the asset alone. Someone now needs Aeroplan to throw off more cash every year, and a loyalty program has exactly two levers for that: sell more points to banks, or make the points you already hold buy less.
We have run this experiment before. Aeroplan’s independent-ownership era ended badly enough that Air Canada had to buy the program back to fix it. And June’s quiet repricing of the long-haul premium bands already showed which direction the chart drifts when nobody’s watching.
The prediction
The chart survives, and it gets more expensive on a schedule. Aeroplan’s published distance chart is the reason it’s the most useful transfer partner in the game, and it’s also now a marketing asset that a C$10 billion valuation depends on. I don’t expect dynamic pricing. I expect the June 2026 playbook, repeated: targeted increases to the aspirational bands every 18 months or so, each one described as a refresh, none of them a massacre, all of them compounding.
What to do
The same thing a devaluation calls for, calmly: book the aspirational stuff on the current chart rather than saving for someday. The 60,000-point transatlantic band, Thai first class, the sweet spots you’ve been circling. Charts under investor pressure move one direction.
And in a twist of timing you could not script, Chase started boosting transfers to Aeroplan by 20% the very next morning. New landlords on Monday, a discount on the currency Tuesday. Use the discount; just spend what you send.
