Air Canada Aeroplan and Chase are launching a co-branded Mastercard in the U.S.

This post is for our readers from the U.S. and of course for our Canadian readers who play the U.S. credit card game! Air Canada just announced they will be partnering with Chase in the U.S. to offer an Air Canada Aeroplan Mastercard in the U.S. This will mark the airline program's reentry into the U.S. market and not only will there be an Aeroplan co-brand card with Chase, Aeroplan will also become a partner in Chase's Ultimate Rewards program.

That means if you have one of the highly touted Chase Sapphire Preferred, Chase Sapphire Reserve Card or one of the  Freedom cards you'll be able to convert those points to Aeroplan. The Chase Aeroplan partnership is slated to launch late in 2021 and we expect more details to be revealed over the next few months as to what can be expected on the new Chase Air Canada Mastercard.

For most of us here north of the border this news will not be of much interest but we should note that by there being a new U.S. based Aeroplan card and more so Aeroplan becoming a transfer partner of Ultimate Rewards we are going to have more people competing for those reward seats. Prior to the relaunch of the new Aeroplan program there was less concern about U.S. or other Aeroplan members around the globe competing for seats on Air Canada as many of those members actually avoided redeeming for flights on Air Canada due to high carrier surchaages. Instead they were redeeming for flights on United, Lufthansa etc. out of the U.S. but now that there are no fuel surcharges for reward flights on Air Canada metal (and a $39 charge for those other airlines) we can expect that there will more U.S. Aeroplan members redeeming for flights to Europe, Asia and beyond on Air Canada via our Canadian gateways and these will be the same flights us Canadians will all be trying to get reward seats on which means a higher likelihood of those flights costing more points.

The New Air Canada Aeroplan Program - All the resources you need