I just received interesting confirmation from Star Alliance that I think could help people: You can choose 40k points instead of Gold status.
"Once you are qualified for the renewal, you will receive the Star Alliance Rewards eligibility anniversary (renewal) email and you'll have 14 days from then to choose from either a Gold Status or 40,000 Star Alliance points"
Also, regarding Aeroplan gold status:
"In terms of your Gold status renewal, you will need to spend $60,000 by your credit card anniversary date, which is [April]. Once you have achieved the eligible threshold spending, your Gold status renewal should be valid until 31st December 2026. With the new [Aeroplan] implementation, it will extend until 31st January 2027.
So:
A) If you're planning on cancelling, and you can reach $60k spending a couple months before cancelling, it seems like you could get the 40k Star Alliance points before cancelling.
B) If you don't need Gold status, especially because you're current Aeroplan Gold Status will last until 31 January 2026 on your current reward, you could take 40k points this year, still have gold status until 31 Jan 2026, and then get gold status again whenever you meet the spending threshold after 31 Jan 2026.
C) 40k points might make the $450 annual fee worth it to some people, especially considering the complimentary travel insurance on this card which I thought had quite good terms when I compared it to other cards.
D) If you don't need the points, it looks like the extended Aeroplan gold status is still available (some people in another post were suggesting it had reverted to 12mths).
Happy to be corrected if I've missed anything. If you email [email protected] they're very responsive. Point A might be a 'deal' (for some people they could get 40k points for free) but I'm not sure how or whether to post it.
Some other things:
Star Alliance points usually convert at 80% to airline points but occasionally there are special conversion rate deals (eg bonus krisflyer conversion rate in september, but be warned about krisflyer's hard 3yr expiry and inferior family pooling plan)
Aeroplan family pooling isn't meant to be available to new customers, but I tried the other day and the link to set it up seems to be active. I didn't go through with it because I'll probably focus on Krisflyer points because of the Velocity points interaction.
If you're trying to use 50k Aeroplan points, I think a good value for economy flights might be a one-way ticket to Vancouver/Seattle (convert some star alliance ponts to cover the extra one or two thousand) which I thought was about $1k value after taxes, whereas return flights to NZ (recommended in a pointshack article) is only about $200 value after taxes.
Cheers,
That makes sense. Cheers.