WestJet Rewards Member Exclusive Fares being paused as of June 25

Thanks to long time Rewards Canada reader CanadianPilgrim for alerting us to this news from WestJet Rewards. The news is that of June 25 WestJet is pausing their Member Exclusive Fares reward option. This is one of the lesser known yet most valuable redemption options in the WestJet Rewards program. If you are unfamiliar with their Member Exclusive fares you can think of them as WestJet's fixed price redemption option that is the vein of your classic flight reward charts from programs like Aeroplan, AIR MILES and most other frequent flyer programs. Essentially you would pay a flat rate of WestJet dollars for a flight on WestJet or even WestJet's partner airlines like Air France, Delta, KLM and Qantas. Flights in Canada or to the U.S. typically ran 99 WestJet dollars for short haul (although we are seeing that as low as 63 right now) or 125 WestJet dollars each way for long haul, to Europe for as little as 349, Asia for 599 and Australia for 629.

For example here's a look at round trip flights between Calgary and Toronto using the Member Exclusive fares this August:

Round trip sees you spending 250 WestJet dollars plus $97.22 in taxes and fees versus the actual cash outlay cost of $459.01 for the cheapest of cheap Econo fares. As you can see they have been and still are a good deal until June 25! This was always an amazing deal to use your 250 to 350 WJD welcome bonus from the WestJet RBC World Elite Mastercard on! Fingers crossed when the rewards return that that value proposition will still be there.

We have reached out to WestJet to see if they can provide us with any details on the future of Member Exclusives. We passed along CanadianPilgrim's note as to whether this is a pause, suspension or cancellation of this feature. Based on the screenshot above from WestJet they do claim it is only a pause so they can revamp the redemption option. They do state 'Enhance' but unfortunately with our experience of covering loyalty programs for nearly 19 years now, we know 'enhance' is more often a term that is negative rather than a positive. Let's hope that's not the case. Also a few years ago WestJet starting working on Member Exclusive rewards for business class on their partner airlines (we even had draft blog post all ready to go and IIRC one way on Delta to Europe was around 600 WJD!) but that was paused as their focus shifted away from that. So let's also hope that when the new Member Exclusives come out you'll be able to redeem for business class on WestJet and their partner airlines!

Learn more about the pause of WestJet's Member Exclusive Fares here.

Here's some of our past coverage of Member Exclusive fares:

• WestJet Rewards lowers, that's right, lowers redemption rates for Member Exclusive award travel on WestJet & Delta Airlines 
• You can now redeem WestJet Rewards dollars for flights on Qantas  
• You can now redeem WestJet Rewards dollars for flights on Air France and KLM!