How to Find Aeroplan Redemptions Using Roame
- Points and Places
- May 20
- 4 min read
How to Find Aeroplan Redemptions Using Roame
Traveling on points is one of the most rewarding ways to explore the world, but it’s also one of the most frustrating if you don’t have the right tools. Collecting points is easy, but redeeming them efficiently, especially with Aeroplan, is where things get tricky.
Aeroplan offers lots of ways to accumulate miles. You can earn points through:
Aeroplan credit cards (from TD, CIBC, and American Express)
American Express Membership Rewards transfers
Everyday spending with Aeroplan retail partners
Booking through the Aeroplan eStore
Flights with Air Canada and Star Alliance partners
With so many earning opportunities, most travelers can build up a healthy Aeroplan balance quickly. But once it’s time to redeem, things can get complicated, especially if you're trying to get outsized value from your points.
Why Finding Good Aeroplan Redemptions Is Harder Than It Should Be
Aeroplan’s move to a hybrid pricing model means that while they technically still publish a fixed reward chart, the actual prices you see often vary—sometimes dramatically—based on demand and route. Partner flights used to be reliably priced at chart levels, but now, even some of those redemptions are creeping toward dynamic pricing.
So while Aeroplan offers a ton of redemption options on paper, finding flights that deliver high value per point requires patience, luck, and the right tools.
Introducing Roame: A Tool for Smarter Redemptions
Over the years, many third-party tools have been developed to help travelers navigate award search frustrations. Some of the more popular ones have been shut down or legally challenged by Air Canada due to the strain they put on Aeroplan’s servers.
One of the best tools ever created—the cowtool—is now retired, but newer tools have emerged to take its place. Among the current crop, the one I’ve found most useful is Roame.
Why I Use Roame for Aeroplan Award Searches
Roame stands out from the competition for a few key reasons:
Accuracy: It does a solid job pulling Aeroplan inventory, including for Star Alliance partners.
Multi-seat detection: Many tools struggle to identify more than one award seat on a route, but ROAME can often spot multiple seats.
Smart alerts: The ability to set alerts for specific routes makes it possible to catch award space when it opens.
Other tools are decent, but I’ve found them to be less reliable when it comes to Aeroplan redemptions. They often miss routes or return inaccurate results when searching for multiple travelers.
Roame isn’t perfect—but in its current form, it’s the best public tool available for Aeroplan optimization.
How Roame Works: Two Key Features
Roame has two main functions: Live Search and SkyView.
1. Live Search: Good, But Limited
Live Search is essentially a one-day search for a specific city pair. You plug in the origin, destination, and date, and it returns available redemptions. This is somewhat useful, but it doesn’t offer much more than what Aeroplan’s website already provides.
Where Live Search does help is in filtering by cabin (economy, business, first), partner vs. Air Canada, and total cost in points. However, for those looking to find the best value flights, this feature alone won’t save much time or effort.
2. SkyView: The Game-Changer
SkyView is where ROAME becomes truly valuable. It allows you to search an entire date range across a specific route and displays availability based on cached Aeroplan data.
This feature makes it easy to:
Spot flights that price at or near the fixed reward chart.
Identify which days offer partner awards at the lowest point levels.
Pinpoint hard-to-find routes like Swiss Business to Toronto out of Zurich or ANA First from Tokyo.
There’s just one caveat: SkyView results are only available for routes that ROAME has cached in its system. They refresh a curated list of routes daily, but if your origin and destination aren’t already part of that list, your search may return “No results found.”
This can be frustrating, especially since some of the most in-demand routes (like Europe to Canada in summer) aren’t always included in the cache.
Creating Alerts: The Workaround
To get around this limitation, ROAME allows users to set up alerts. When you add a new alert, that route is added to the daily data refresh queue. After a few days, you'll begin receiving emails with updated award availability.
This is incredibly helpful when searching for routes that aren’t already included in ROAME’s default cache. However, there are some limitations:
You can only set city-to-city alerts. For example, “Paris to Toronto” is fine, but “Europe to Canada” (multi-region) is not.
The free plan does not include SkyView or alerts. You’ll need the Pro version to access these features.
Even with a Pro plan, you’re limited to five alerts at a time. This is a bit restrictive, especially for broader searches like “anywhere in Europe to any major Canadian hub.”
Still, once those alerts are active, the tool becomes extremely powerful. For example, when planning a return from Europe this summer, I set alerts for several city pairs. Within a few days, I received notifications for flights on United and even some rare Swiss Business seats—all at fixed reward chart pricing.
Pricing: Is Roame Worth Paying For?
Roame offers a free tier, but it’s fairly limited and doesn’t include the SkyView feature, which is where the real value lies. To get full access—including SkyView and alerts—you’ll need to subscribe to the Pro plan.
The cost is modest (at the time of writing, under $10 US/month), and the time and points it can save more than justify the investment, especially if you redeem Aeroplan points frequently.
If you're planning a major redemption like a family trip in business class or a round-the-world adventure—the cost of a subscription will likely pay for itself with one well-optimized booking.
Final Thoughts
Redeeming Aeroplan points can be both rewarding and frustrating. With dynamic pricing, limited award availability, and a sea of poor-value redemptions, navigating Aeroplan’s ecosystem takes effort and the right tools.
Roame has become my go-to search platform for finding award availability on Aeroplan, especially for routes with scarce partner space. While it has limitations (particularly the alert cap and city-only search logic), it’s currently the most effective tool on the market.
Whether you're a casual points collector or a seasoned travel hacker, Roame is well worth a look. It can help you stretch your Aeroplan points further and maybe even turn a frustrating search into your next dream trip.
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