Aeroplan started as a familiar idea: reward travellers, encourage repeat behaviour, and make flying feel a little more worthwhile. Launched in 1984, it gradually expanded beyond a traditional frequent-flyer program before being spun out as a separate entity under Aimia in 2002. The real inflection point arrived decades later, when Air Canada brought Aeroplan back in-house in 2019. That move didn’t read like nostalgia. It read like a strategy.
Trew Knowledge partnered with Air Canada at that critical moment to re-architect Aeroplan as enterprise infrastructure rather than a standalone program, enabling consistent operation across channels and partners while preserving identity integrity and trust. The effort focused on building digital foundations capable of supporting scale, regulatory complexity, and high-pressure operational environments.
The result is not just a larger loyalty program, but a structurally different one. Today, Aeroplan operates as Canada’s largest travel rewards coalition, serving more than 8 million active members and supporting a broad, multi-industry partner ecosystem. But the most interesting part isn’t the number of members or the size of the network. It’s the structure underneath it all: an omnichannel ecosystem built to keep identities consistent, preferences respected, communications compliant, and partner expansion possible without rebuilding everything from scratch.
Why Loyalty Has Become a Hard Systems Problem for Airlines
Airlines operate under conditions most digital platforms never face: real-time disruption, regulatory scrutiny, physical constraints, and extreme load variability. Loyalty systems must function inside that reality, not alongside it.
Several structural challenges define modern airline loyalty.
Identity Fragmentation Across Channels
Airlines run distributed technology stacks across web, mobile, call centres, airport systems, and partner environments. Without a unified identity layer, loyalty recognition breaks down. Status becomes inconsistent, benefits fail to apply, and customers experience the same airline as multiple disconnected entities.
Consent, Preference, and Communication Complexity
Loyalty programs depend on frequent communication, yet airlines must comply with strict privacy and anti-spam regulations while managing preferences across channels. When consent and preferences drift between systems, communications become noisy, misaligned, or non-compliant, undermining trust even when intent is good.
Partner Ecosystems that Resist Scale
Coalition loyalty requires constant partner expansion. Each new airline, retailer, or financial institution introduces new integration patterns, earning rules, and data dependencies. Without a repeatable enablement framework, partner growth increases technical debt and creates an inconsistent experience.
Security Pressure Driven by Stored Value
Loyalty points behave like currency. Account takeover, fraud, and abuse target loyalty systems aggressively. Weak security doesn’t just cause financial loss; it erodes confidence in the entire ecosystem.
When Systems Fail, Loyalty Is Judged
Loyalty is not tested during routine bookings. It is tested during cancellations, rebooking surges, and operational failures. If systems degrade under load or messages conflict across channels, loyalty equity collapses quickly.
Economic Shifts that Change Perceived Value
The industry’s move toward spend-based earning models improves profitability, but it also reshapes how loyalty feels. Without clear experience design and communication, these shifts can appear punitive rather than rational, even when overall value remains strong.
These challenges explain why loyalty cannot be exclusively treated as a marketing program. It is a cross-cutting digital system with operational consequences.
What It Takes to Build Loyalty That Holds Under Pressure
Addressing these challenges requires architectural decisions, not surface-level optimizations. The most resilient loyalty ecosystems share a set of underlying capabilities.
A Single, Authoritative Identity and Profile Layer
Loyalty systems must recognize customers consistently across all touchpoints. This requires a centralized identity and profile foundation that eliminates duplication, synchronizes attributes, and ensures benefits apply regardless of channel.
Consent and Preference Management as Operational Systems
Privacy compliance and customer trust depend on treating consent and preferences as first-class data, governed centrally and enforced everywhere. This enables relevant communication without crossing regulatory or experiential boundaries.
Partner Enablement Built for Repetition
Coalition growth depends on reusable integration patterns, clear governance, and predictable data flows. Partner onboarding should feel incremental, not destabilizing.
Security Designed for Adversarial Conditions
Multi-factor authentication, monitoring, and anomaly detection must be standard. Loyalty security is not optional hardening; it is core experience protection.
Resilience Engineered into the Journey
Systems must degrade gracefully under load, maintain consistency across channels, and prioritize clarity during disruption. In airline contexts, resilience is a user-experience requirement.
Data Maturity that Enables Credible Personalization
Personalization only works when identity, consent, and data consistency are solved first. Otherwise, relevance becomes guesswork and trust erodes.
These capabilities define modern loyalty infrastructure. Aeroplan demonstrates how it can operate in practice.
Aeroplan as Proof: Loyalty Rebuilt as a Platform
The Omnichannel Ecosystem Behind the Program
At the core of the platform overhaul was the consolidation of customer identity into a single system, enabling the mobile app, website, loyalty databases, airline reservation systems, call centres, and partner portals to operate as a single integrated network. The outcome sounds simple and is notoriously difficult to achieve: a secure account that behaves consistently everywhere.
This is where loyalty starts to resemble product design rather than promotion. When identity fractures, people feel it immediately: failed logins, mismatched profiles, forgotten preferences, and support interactions that begin with re-explaining context. The work focused on removing that fragmentation so the experience could remain coherent, even as complexity increased behind the scenes.
Centralized Identity as an Operating Model
The foundation for this consistency came from migrating customer identity data into a centralized identity layer built on SAP Customer Data Cloud. The value here wasn’t the technology choice itself, but what it enabled: unified authentication and profile management across every application tied into the ecosystem.
That consolidation changed what became possible. It established a single source of truth for profile and preference data, narrowing the gap between what customers expect to be true and what systems actually recognize as true. We worked with Air Canada to design this identity model as an operating assumption, not a downstream integration.
Consent as a System Rule, Not a Checkbox
Privacy-by-design shaped the platform from the outset, with consent controls aligned with real regulatory requirements, including Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation and the GDPR. In an ecosystem of this scale, consent isn’t a decorative layer. It defines how communications, personalization, and partner engagement are allowed to function.
When consent is poorly governed, growth tactics introduce risk. When it’s governed well, communication earns credibility. Relevance matters, but respect matters more. The transformation treated compliance as part of trust infrastructure, not as a separate compliance exercise bolted on later.
Security Built Into the Loyalty Experience
Multi-factor authentication and real-time security monitoring were introduced to protect member accounts and reduce exposure to fraud. In a loyalty environment, security incidents don’t register as abstract failures. They register as personal loss: drained balances, compromised accounts, and eroded confidence.
A secure system protects more than stored value. It protects the sense that the ecosystem itself is safe to participate in, and that’s a prerequisite for sustained engagement.
Partner Enablement Without Architectural Drag
Scalability on the partner side depended on reducing the cost of each new integration. By unifying identity and data flows, onboarding new partners no longer requires extensive redevelopment or custom logic for every channel.
This created a quiet but decisive advantage. Coalition loyalty only works when expansion doesn’t collapse under its own complexity. The architecture reduced silos, kept profiles and balances synchronized across touchpoints, and lowered the technical debt that typically slows ecosystem growth. We approached partner enablement as a structural problem, not a series of one-off integrations.
Business Impact: Loyalty as Revenue, Demand, and Retention
The platform now sits directly inside Air Canada’s commercial engine, shaping behaviour across membership growth, redemption patterns, partner economics, and credit card engagement.
Habit Formation at Scale
Membership has grown to more than 8 million active members, roughly doubling since reacquisition. Scale matters because loyalty strengthens as it becomes habitual. The more frequently it shows up in daily life, the more likely it becomes the default.
This also increases switching costs without relying on coercion. Accumulated points, status, and benefits create hesitation around abandonment, translating into durable retention rather than forced lock-in.
Redemption as Demand Shaping
In 2023 alone, members redeemed points for more than 1.5 million flight rewards. Redemption is often framed as an expense, but in practice, it plays a central role in shaping demand. It fills seats, stimulates incremental travel, and keeps the currency feel usable rather than theoretical.
When redemption feels painful, loyalty weakens. When it feels accessible, value becomes tangible.
Points as an Economic Instrument
Significant revenue is generated through the sale of points to partners, including credit card issuers and retailers, alongside marketing agreements. Within this ecosystem, points function as a form of currency. Partners purchase them, distribute them, and benefit from customer engagement and traffic. The airline benefits from diversified revenue streams and deeper behavioural insight.
This dynamic explains why ownership mattered in 2019. Bringing the program back in-house allowed tighter integration between customer data and commercial strategy, improving personalization, cross-sell opportunities, and long-term value creation.
Credit Cards as the Flywheel
Co-branded cards issued with TD, CIBC, and American Express in Canada, and Chase in the U.S., form one of the strongest engines in the system. Banks pay for the right to issue cards and award points, creating predictable cash flow through point purchases and marketing commitments.
Everyday spending earns points. Points drive redemption. Redemption reinforces repeat travel. Loyalty becomes an active behavioural loop rather than a passive reward structure.
Partner Networks: Building a Coalition With Real Gravity
What distinguishes this ecosystem is the breadth and cohesion of its partner network, extending earning and redemption far beyond Air Canada flights.
Airline Reach Without Confinement
Participation includes all 26 Star Alliance carriers and extends beyond the alliance through partnerships with airlines such as Emirates and Flydubai, Etihad Airways, and Vistara. With more than 45 airline partners and access to over 1,300 destinations, points remain flexible and globally usable.
That flexibility matters. When points feel constrained, their perceived value erodes. When they remain travel-ready, the ecosystem stays resilient.
Financial Partnerships Embedded in Daily Life
Co-branded financial partnerships anchor loyalty in everyday spending. Accelerated earning is paired with tangible travel benefits, preferred reward pricing, and hotel redemption incentives such as a fourth night free.
The result is a loyalty relationship that doesn’t begin and end with a boarding pass. It becomes part of daily financial behaviour.
Daily-Life Partners that Keep Aeroplan Top-of-Mind
Aeroplan’s partnerships with Uber, Starbucks, and the LCBO extend its presence into routine habits. The Parkland Fuel partnership via JOURNIE Rewards adds over 1,100 locations across several gas and convenience brands, with options to earn points and redeem for fuel discounts or services like car washes.
Coalition loyalty becomes most powerful when it stops being episodic. When points can be earned while commuting, buying coffee, or filling a tank, Aeroplan becomes less like a travel tool and more like an everyday layer.
Hotels, Transfers, and E-commerce
Aeroplan’s ecosystem includes hotel and car rental relationships, and a shopping portal model through its eStore, featuring major retailers and bonus point opportunities. The expanded relationship with Marriott Bonvoy in 2024 enabled two-way point transfers and limited status matches, blurring the line between airline and hotel loyalty.
That blurring isn’t confusion. It’s strategic convergence. Travel behaviours aren’t siloed, so loyalty programs are increasingly designed not to be either.
Customer Experience: Loyalty That Feels Like Product Design
Digital Experience as the Front Door
Aeroplan’s web and app experiences act as hubs: balance checks, partner offers, bookings, and trip management. Integration with Air Canada’s booking system keeps the experience cohesive, and real-time features like flight status support a smoother journey.
A loyalty program often becomes the customer’s most frequent interface with an airline. That makes digital experience central, not peripheral.
In-flight Value as a Membership Signal
In May 2025, fast, free Wi-Fi was introduced for Aeroplan members on Air Canada’s North American flights, with international expansion planned for 2026 through a sponsorship with Bell. The benefit served as both value and signal, reinforcing that membership mattered during the journey itself, not just at booking or redemption.
Personalization Driven by Data Maturity
Aeroplan’s integration into Air Canada’s CRM supports more advanced analytics and targeted communications. Personalization becomes more credible when it emerges from unified identity, consistent preferences, and compliant consent. In that environment, targeting doesn’t need to feel intrusive. It can feel aligned.
Recognition and Trust
Awards don’t replace business fundamentals, but they often reveal perception at scale.
Aeroplan’s recognition includes multiple Freddie Awards, including a strong 2023 showing with wins for Airline Program of the Year (Americas), Best Promotion, and Best Redemption Ability. In April 2025, Aeroplan won Program of the Year (Airline), Best Elite Program (Airline), and Best Promotion (Airline) tied to its 40th Anniversary campaign.
These awards reflect member sentiment. When large groups of frequent travellers choose a program in a public vote, the signal is clear: value feels real, redemption works, and the program delivers.
The 2026 shift to revenue-based earnings and SQC
Effective January 1, 2026, Aeroplan began awarding points for flights based on the airfare paid rather than the distance flown. A new Status Qualifying Credits (SQC) system replaced status miles and segments, allowing elite status to be earned through a combination of flying, credit card spend, and partner activity.
This shift rewards high-value customers and reinforces ecosystem engagement. It also aligns with a broader industry trend toward revenue-based models, while maintaining a distinctive emphasis on total engagement beyond flying.
Where Organizations Tend to Underestimate Complexity
The complexity usually isn’t visible in the interface. It lives in the seams: the transitions between systems, teams, channels, and partners. That’s where loyalty ecosystems either feel cohesive or feel brittle.
Aeroplan’s approach suggests a different mindset: build the seams as deliberately as the screens. When a loyalty platform reduces silos, keeps profiles consistent, respects consent, and enables partners quickly, the customer experience becomes calmer. Calm builds trust. Trust builds repeat behaviour.
How Loyalty Moved Into the Core of the Business
Aeroplan’s evolution illustrates what happens when loyalty is treated as a serious digital ecosystem rather than a standalone program. Identity becomes unified. Consent becomes operational. Security becomes part of the product itself. Partner relationships become scalable instead of fragile. The outcome isn’t simply a larger points program, but a platform that strengthens customer relationships, supports diversified revenue streams, and enables growth without constant reinvention.
That shift was shaped by real architectural decisions. In our work with Air Canada on Aeroplan, loyalty had to be rethought as part of the airline’s core systems, not something layered on top of them. Identity, consent, integrations, and operational resilience couldn’t live in isolation, because at scale the experience is defined by how those systems interact, especially under pressure.
Seen through that lens, loyalty stops being about mechanics and starts being about coherence. The moments that matter most are rarely the planned ones. They surface during disruptions, handoffs, and edge cases when systems are stressed, and expectations are highest. If identity fragments, if consent breaks down, or if integrations fail, loyalty erodes quickly. When those foundations hold, loyalty becomes durable.
For organizations facing similar complexity, the work rarely begins with points or perks. It begins with architecture: designing systems that connect experience, data, consent, and partners into a cohesive whole that behaves consistently at scale.
That is the work Trew Knowledge does. Drawing on experience delivering Aeroplan’s digital foundations, we help enterprises design and build connected platforms that remain reliable beneath the surface, from omnichannel experience design and secure identity and consent models to integration architecture, performance engineering, and operational resilience. Start a conversation with our experts.
