Air Canada Vacations: Deal or No Deal?

If you’ve ever stepped on board an airline in Canada, you’ve likely received a marketing email at some point advertising their vacation package travel services. These vacation products state that they provide a discount, sometimes quite significant, from the retail price of flights, hotels, and other incidental travel services.

But is this true? Today, join me in analyzing Air Canada Vacations and seeing if their holiday breaks are worth your year-round bucks.

What Are Air Canada Vacations?

Air Canada Vacations are just what’s written on the label: a pre-made travel product that’s designed around your travel needs… so long as your travel needs take you somewhere with high air traffic.

Part of the reason that these travel products can advertise lower prices than paying the retail price for flights, hotels, and other services à la carte is because the packages themselves are offered to hot tourist destinations. Air Canada can thus theoretically afford to cut you a break on the price due to economies of scale.

As we shall see, though, while the prices may seem attractive, the products being sold often do come with additional terms and conditions you should be on the lookout for, particularly regarding their cancellation policies. 

Please also note that in this article we won’t be covering cruises: while cruising is one of the fastest-growing segments of the leisure travel industry, it would require comparison against other external travel agencies. 

On the other hand, Air Canada airfare included in vacation packages can be compared against Air Canada’s own prices. One of the bonuses of all Air Canada Vacations is that your first checked bag is always free, so we’ll make sure to adjust for that when calculating. Seat selection is extra when flying in economy class, though.

What is the Air Canada Vacations Fine Print?

Before we go into whether these products are a good deal, there are a whole bunch of caveats I wish to make. Almost as many, in fact, as the terms and conditions attached to the purchase of these packages.

First: if something is constantly on sale, then the listed MSRP isn’t the real MSRP. The sale price (for which the product is always on sale) is the effective real retail price. Anyone who has received Air Canada Vacations emails can attest to this, as can a simple visit to the banner on the front page of their website:

In short: when everything’s on sale all the time, nothing’s on sale.

Second, consider that the fine print is positively labyrinthine:

This isn’t short, or uncomplicated. The fees, which are applied per person on the reservation, can’t be described as anything but punishing.

What it really comes down to is that if you need to change or cancel your reservation, it’s going to cost a lot of money. More importantly, Air Canada Vacations won’t even tolerate a change 21 days prior to traveling to Canada, the US, or Europe, or 45 days before going anywhere else.

You need to pay extra for “travel protection” for the honor of once again paying more to cancel or modify your trip. This raises the price of any vacation package, even if you don’t use the protection.

This effectively means Air Canada Vacations are as close to inflexible prepaid reservations as is humanly imaginable the second they are booked. The one exception is cruises, which are subject to their own schedule.

Third, before we consider booking one of these products we should realize something else: you may be able to stack the vacation packages with your preferred loyalty program. Whether you’re collecting Hilton Honors points or Sandals Resorts points (for all-inclusive lovers), you can often opt to earn points while doing one of these packages if any special offers are available.

However… You are going to pay for it. No kickbacks of points come free, and any such package co-branded with another loyalty program is almost by necessity going to be more expensive than an Air Canada Vacation at a lower-rate, unaffiliated hotel property.

Exploring The Value of Air Canada Vacations

To better understand if Air Canada Vacations are worth it, let’s take a look at three examples: one vacation package within Canada, one vacation package to a sun destination, and one overseas vacation package.

Are Air Canada Vacations Worth It For Travel in Canada?

So let’s test these packages domestically to see if you’re getting an effective break on the price of booking flights in Canada using Air Canada Vacations.

First up is a Christmas getaway from December 22nd to the 28th, traveling from Toronto to Victoria, BC. This is a good example of what a typical Canadian might do over the holiday season.

As we can see, the airfare and hotel cost $3327.78. The flights are nonstop but don’t include hotel transfers. It’s also subject to the extreme cancellation requirements of Air Canada vacations, which we’ll get to in the end part of this article before assessing if this is a good deal.

When we look at these dates, we can find prices for the same hotel and airfare.

We can see from the above online travel agencies of varying dubiosity that the price for a room may range from $1035 to $1543, though some of these offers are ostensibly refundable and others are not. However, of these sites, Booking.com is probably the most reputable at $1543 all in.

Airfare for our trip also has a spread:

The nonstop flight options here cost $2069. However, they are standard fares, so checked bags cost an extra $70 per seat.

Therefore, the effective cost of the flights is $2209. If we take the lowest hotel rate and airfare with luggage, this gives us a total cost of $3244 vs Air Canada Vacations $3327. 

However, that cheapest hotel option may only be a teaser for the Google algorithm. The real price for the hotel is probably closer to $1543, giving us a total cost for the trip of about $3752 vs. the Air Canada Vacations price of $3327. In this case, Air Canada Vacations is a savings of about $400.

Is this a superlatively great deal? Maybe not. Does using Air Canada Vacations result in savings? Yes.

Is It Worth Booking an Air Canada Vacations Package to Sun Destinations?

Next up, let’s take a look at the most common of Canadian pastimes: going to the sun belt for Spring Break, which in Quebec goes from March 1st to 8th. 

How much is it for a family of four with no babies or toddlers, but also no “adult” children over 12, to go to an all-inclusive in Mexico over this period? I’ll go for the cheapest 4-star hotel available in Cancun, the Hotel NYX Cancun.

Is this actually a good deal? First, let’s look at the price of plane tickets:

Well, that’s a surprise! The cost of flights is high, but the hotel is only $606 over the top of the actual transportation! How much would it be if we had to pay out of pocket?

This is where I run into something interesting: whenever I look online, it says four people can’t stay in a room on platforms like Agoda.

Agoda, by the way, is the platform NYX’s own booking tool (via SkyScanner) defaults to. As an all-inclusive property, I imagine we don’t see this easy to book directly without a package as the hotel’s bread and butter is probably in selling travel bundles via agents such as Air Canada Vacations. The effective “real” retail price of the room on its own is therefore hard to establish and probably doesn’t exist unless bundled with flights.

So would this be a good value? Well, would you want to pay $1,915 per person round-trip to Cancun, just because it’s March Break? I wouldn’t, but just based on the cost of airfare and an approximate retail price for the rooms, this seems to punch well above its weight.

However, would I want to spend approximately $2,200 a person on the all-inclusive experience? No, but the value is yours to determine.

How Far Can Air Canada Vacations Go Overseas?

For my last example, I want to do some surgery on an Air Canada Vacation tour package. The Vacations site proudly advertises that they will give a “$800” off per couple, or $400 per person at the time of writing this article in October 2024.

Alright, let’s take a look at how far we can get going all the way to Australia for two people from Vancouver. For the record, this package is the cheapest offered for this entire tour, from January 1st to 13th of the new year.

This tour package includes airfare, transit to and from the airport in Australia, a 7-day car rental, and 10 nights’ worth of hotels in 4-star hotels in New South Wales.

At $9,418 including the $800 “sale,” this tour isn’t free, but it does come with a lot of activities. So let’s dissect whether this is actually a good deal or not. First up, the flights:

Air Canada will sell these exact flights for $4086, with the first checked bag still free. This constitutes 43.4% of the budget of the entire trip. If we value the private transfers to and from Sydney Airport at $100 per direction, that takes us to $4286.

I could now dissect the itinerary further and find the nightly rate of every single night’s hotel stay, but I’ll instead opt to average it to the approximately $182 CAD (or $135 USD) that 4-star hotels in New South Wales cost per night. So with hotels, the cost is now $6106.

Then there’s the car rental: a full-size car that runs approximately $45 or so a day for $315. This gives us a running total of $6421.

But wait: the tour also includes a tour boat cruise with lunch, a charcuterie board and wine bottle in the mountains, and 4,000 Aeroplan points per person on the itinerary.

When one considers our running costs so far, this would make said cruise and wine bottle be worth approximately $2,997 together. 

For that kind of money, I could rent a yacht, buy a case of champagne, and still be left with enough cash leftover to buy myself at least 10,000 Aeroplan points. Presumably the temporary friends my champagne and yacht attracted would be highly impressed by this last acquisition.

One note on how I did calculations: even if the hotels all cost double the average price of a 4-star room in New South Wales, and the car rental costs triple my estimate, the sum total is still $8871. This represents a $547 shortfall. Two lunches, a bottle of wine, and an afternoon boat tour costing this much outside the Maldives still strains credulity.

Are Air Canada Vacation Packages a Good Deal?

So, are Air Canada Vacations a good deal?

The answer can vary greatly depending on what type of getaway you’re booking.

The issue is, to determine if you’re saving money, you have to reverse engineer your entire itinerary to uncover exactly how much money it is you’re saving.

As we’ve seen above, this doesn’t usually amount to much in Canada, can offer a lot when going on an all-inclusive vacation to a well-traveled place like the Sun Belt, or be horrible value for money on tour packages far overseas.

Even in a place like Mexico or the Dominican Republic, the price of a travel package isn’t the best determinant of true value because of the opaque booking practices of many resorts who only deal with travel agents, and so the base retail price of rooms is hard to calculate with certainty.

Personally, I don’t really think that the absolute minimum monetary price is what Air Canada Vacations are for. Sometimes you happen to score it, and that’s a great bonus.

Overall, however, I think these vacation products are not for folks who wish to meticulously piece every portion of their getaway from the ground up and pinch every penny.

Air Canada Vacations are, based on the research I’ve done for this article, closer akin to a convenience product. You pay a set price and know the exact itinerary and destination you’re going to, all packaged in one easy-to-understand bundle. This also means you’re likelier to get a cheaper cost of entry on vacation packages like all-inclusive resorts which benefit from economies of scale.

There is one other thing to consider: if at any point along your journey, you have an issue, you don’t need to deal with various hotel chains or with Air Canada itself. You can instead call Air Canada Vacations and expect one of their travel agents to support you.

I am perfectly comfortable complaining to anyone who will listen, but you may not be, in which case having a trained professional on your side might have a value all to itself.

So is it a good deal? In my opinion, no. Having done a deep dive into the actual prices of these products and their cancellation policies, I wouldn’t book these. But then again, I don’t have a growing family I want to take for an economical (per person) vacation. I’d rather just generate miles and points and mix that with my cash redemptions.

Can Air Canada Aeroplan Points Be Redeemed Towards Air Canada Vacations?

You can redeem Air Canada Aeroplan points toward Air Canada Vacations. That being said, much like redeeming Aeroplan for hotels, car rentals, gift cards, or merchandise, the value is likely to be poor even if you shop around.

This is because the price of redemption is capped at 1 cent per Aeroplan point, which would generally be a bad value.

There could potentially be uses for this sort of redemption, but only if you had an enormous amount of points and were absolutely dead set against paying any cash out of pocket.

As an aside: there is also the real problem of credit card insurance. If you apply 5,000 Aeroplan as a $50 voucher, this might waive your credit card’s included insurance as you didn’t actually pay for the entirety of the reservation. 

Whether this niche scenario would play out the way I describe I am not sure; however, a voucher does technically reduce the cost of the reservation. I would recommend booking any Air Canada Vacation, therefore, with an Aeroplan co-branded credit card.

You can also opt to redeem Aeroplan points for a cruise, but you’ll need to call Air Canada Vacations’ number at 1-866-529-2079.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve enjoyed my deep dive into the world of Air Canada Vacations. Based on my research and calculations of the true prices of the various travel products offered by this company, I feel that I can state these aren’t the best value.

The cancellation policies are punitive, the prices are relatively high when broken down into their constituent parts, and the incentives to book aren’t really high enough to justify the cost of entry. They also engage in dodgy old sales tactics like everything being on sale all the time, meaning nothing is on sale in reality.

Air Canada Vacations, for me, are no deal.