Aeroplan’s Family Sharing feature makes it easy for families and households to pool their points together.

With this feature, it’s possible to earn and redeem as a single unit, thereby leveraging Aeroplan points to achieve travel goals sooner.

What Is Aeroplan Family Sharing?

Family Sharing is a feature with Aeroplan that allows families and households to pool points from separate accounts into a single account. The feature was introduced when Aeroplan was relaunched in November 2020.

Every Family Sharing group (let’s call it “Family” for short) can include up to eight members. 

Any Aeroplan member can initiate the process of setting up a Family by inputting the Aeroplan number and name of any member they’d like to invite to the group.

The member who initiates the Family will become the head of the group, who has the ability to lock and unlock each Family member’s ability to redeem points out of the shared pool.

Once someone joins a Family, their points are added to the group’s balance, and they instantly become available for redemption. We’ll illustrate how this works in detail later on in this post.

How to Set Up Aeroplan Family Sharing

Family Sharing is simple to set up and requires no maintenance to keep it active.

To set up a Family Sharing group, first log-in to your Aeroplan account, and then navigate to “My Aeroplan” from the drop-down menu displaying your balance.

From there, click on the “Family Sharing” tab in the middle of the page. If you already have a Family Sharing group, this page will list the total balance, as well as each individual balance. 

If you don’t have any members in your group, click on “Add new member” to get started.

Here, you’ll need to add their first name, last name, Aeroplan number, and their relationship to you. You can also specify whether or not they can redeem points.

For relationship, you can select “Spouse/Partner,” “Child,” “Parent,” “Sibling,” “In-law, ” and “Grandchild/Grandparent,” as well as “Other” as a catch-all option.

The Family Sharing feature is really more about forming groups with trusted contacts with whom you’d like to pool your points, rather than strictly keeping it within family members.

You can use the “Can redeem points” toggle to select whether or not the designated family member is allowed to redeem points out of the shared account.

For example, this might make sense if you’re a parent who’s pooling your child’s points together with your own — you wouldn’t want your child curiously logging in one day and blowing the family’s hard-earned points on an ANA First Class flight for themselves.

After you’ve sent out an invitation, the invitee will receive an email letting them know that they’ve been invited to a Family Sharing group. They can either accept or decline the invitation.

Once the invitation is accepted, the new Family member’s points balance instantly pools into the collective Family’s points balance. All of their future earnings will enter the pooled points balance as well.

Aeroplan Family Sharing Rules

Unlike some other loyalty programs out there, Aeroplan does not ask for proof of familial relations, nor will there be a requirement that everyone in the Family have the same address or anything like that.

Instead, there are a few measures put in place to thwart the “rich distant uncles” out there who might have any unscrupulous ideas:

• Once a member joins a Family, they must remain in that Family for at least three months.
• If a member of a Family chooses to exit the group after that three-month period, they are not allowed to join another Family Sharing group for a period of six months.

Family Sharing groups also allow for the sharing of certain benefits.

For example, if someone has Aeroplan Elite Status or holds a co-branded credit card, they benefit from preferred pricing on Air Canada flights as part of the dynamic pricing model.

Once this person joins a Family, then everyone else in the Family will benefit from preferred pricing as well.

To put it another way, if one member of a Family is a Super Elite member, then everyone in the group will see the same preferred pricing that the Super Elite has.

Note that this doesn’t extend any other Aeroplan Elite Status benefits to the Family – only preferred pricing on Aeroplan redemptions with Air Canada flights.

Redeeming Aeroplan Points from a Family Sharing Group

The most interesting part of Family Sharing is how it works on the redemption side. 

Whenever a Family member redeems Aeroplan points, there is no ability to designate whether those points are deducted from their own points balance or another Family member’s points balance.

Rather, the points will come out of all Family members’ balances, and will be deducted proportionally to everyone’s respective points balances.

Let’s use an example to illustrate this.

Suppose that Alice, Bob, Charlie, and Devon form a Family Sharing group. After a few months of earning Aeroplan points, their balances sit at 100,000, 75,000, 25,000 and 300,000 Aeroplan points, respectively. 

Therefore, the collective points balance for the Family is 500,000 Aeroplan points. Alice and Bob now decide to treat themselves to a pair of EVA Air business class tickets, which they book between Toronto and Taipei for 75,000 Aeroplan points each.

Even though Alice and Bob both have enough points on their own to cover the 75,000 Aeroplan points, that’s not how the points get deducted.

Instead, Aeroplan calculates that Alice, Bob, Charlie, and Devon’s points balances each represent 20%, 15%, 5%, and 60% of the overall collective balance; therefore, those percentages are applied to the redemption amount of 150,000 Aeroplan points to determine how many points are deducted from each Family member’s account.

• 20% of 150,000 points is 30,000 points, which is deducted from Alice’s account, leaving her with 100,000 – 30,000 = 70,000 points
• 15% of 150,000 points is 22,500 points, which is deducted from Bob’s account, leaving him with 75,000 – 22,500 = 52,500 points
• 5% of 150,000 points is 7,500 points, which is deducted from Charlie’s account, leaving him with 25,000 – 7,500 = 17,500 points
• 60% of 150,000 points is 90,000 points, which is deducted from Devon’s account, leaving her with 30,000 – 90,000 = 210,000 points

As you can see, Charlie and Devon effectively subsidized Alice and Bob’s tickets, because everyone’s in the same Family. Clearly, trust and transparency are paramount amongst those you choose to add to your Family Sharing group.

Whenever a redemption is made from the Family group, it resets the expiration date for each member of the group. If there has not been a redemption from a family group in 18 months, each individual is then responsible for keeping their own account active.

Conclusion

Aeroplan’s Family Sharing feature, introduced in November 2020, greatly streamlines the experience of earning and redeeming points in two-player mode.

Setting up a Family Sharing account allows you to pool all of your household members’ Aeroplan points together, and the extension of preferred pricing from one member’s Aeroplan Elite Status or a co-branded Aeroplan credit card to the entire family adds further value to this unique feature.