She Had 180,000 Aeroplan Points. Then June 1st Happened.

Aeroplan quietly rewrote its award chart on June 1st. No press release. No email to members. Just a new PDF on their website and suddenly a business class seat to Tokyo that cost 75,000 points now costs 95,000.

I wrote about building the devaluation alert system back in May. That post was honest about the gaps. This one is about what happened when a real user ran into one of those gaps, and what I've been building since.

Her name isn't important. Let's call her Priya.

Priya signed up for MileIntel in March. She had 183,400 Aeroplan points sitting in her account, accumulated over three years of Air Canada flights and a TD Aeroplan Visa she'd been putting every grocery run on. She had a rough plan: use them for a business class trip to Japan with her husband sometime in late 2026.

She wasn't in a rush. The points were there. The trip felt real but distant.

On May 28th, MileIntel flagged a portfolio value update for her account. Her 183,400 Aeroplan points were worth approximately $3,485 at our then-current valuation of 1.9 cents per point. She saw the notification, felt good about it, and moved on with her day.

On June 1st, Aeroplan published the new award chart.

The Tokyo business class redemption she'd been mentally planning went from 75,000 points per person to 95,000. Round trip for two: 150,000 points at the old rate, 190,000 at the new one. She didn't have 190,000 points. She had 183,400.

She found out on June 4th, not from us. From a Reddit thread.

What MileIntel Caught (And What It Didn't)

Here's the uncomfortable part of this story.

Our devaluation tracker did flag the Aeroplan award chart change. It picked it up on June 2nd, about 30 hours after the new chart went live. We sent a portfolio impact alert to users with Aeroplan balances above 50,000 points. Priya got that alert.

But she got it on June 2nd. The change was already live. The window to book at the old rates had closed.

I've been sitting with that for a few weeks now. We built the system to catch devaluations. We caught it. And it still wasn't useful enough.

The problem isn't detection speed, though we're working on that too. The real problem is that Priya didn't know to act before June 1st. She didn't know the change was coming. Nobody outside of a few frequent flyer blogs did.

That's the gap I've been trying to close.

app.mileintel.com/devaluation-tracker

The Feature I've Been Building: Upgrade Monitor

Priya's situation clarified something for me. The devaluation alert is reactive. It tells you what changed. What she actually needed was something that watched her specific redemption goal and told her when to move.

That's a different problem. And it's closer to what the upgrade monitor does.

I've been building the upgrade monitor for about six weeks. The original scope was narrow: watch a specific flight, alert when business or first class award space opens up. Useful for people who book economy and hope to upgrade, or who want to snag a last-minute premium cabin at points prices.

But after Priya's story, I expanded the scope. The upgrade monitor now also watches the points cost of your saved routes, not just the seat availability. If you've told MileIntel you want to fly YYZ to NRT in business class using Aeroplan points, it tracks both whether seats are available and what they cost in points. When either changes, you get an alert.

The seat availability piece was technically harder than I expected. Airlines don't publish award availability in a clean feed. We're scraping and inferring from a combination of sources, and the data has gaps. I'd estimated two weeks to get it working reliably. It took five.

The points cost monitoring piece was actually simpler once I'd already built the award chart change detection for the devaluation tracker. I reused a lot of that infrastructure. The new part was tying it to a user's saved routes and making the alert feel personal rather than generic.

app.mileintel.com/upgrade-monitor

What the Numbers Look Like Right Now

That 30-hour gap is the number I keep coming back to. For a devaluation that was already live, 30 hours is fast. For a user trying to book before the change, it's useless.

I don't have a clean solution to the pre-announcement problem yet. Airlines don't telegraph devaluations. Aeroplan certainly didn't. The best signal we have is monitoring for PDF changes on program pages, watching for unusual award availability shifts, and tracking what the frequent flyer community is discussing. We're building toward that. It's not there yet.

What Priya Did Next

I reached out to her after she posted in our feedback channel. She wasn't angry, which honestly surprised me. She said something that stuck with me: "I didn't know I was supposed to be watching. I thought the points were just... there."

That's the mental model most people have about loyalty points. They're a savings account. Stable. Patient. You'll get to them eventually.

The reality is they're more like a perishable asset. Aeroplan's June 1st change effectively erased about $740 of value from her account overnight, based on the redemption she'd been planning. She still has the points. They're just worth less for what she wanted to do with them.

She's now using the upgrade monitor to watch YYZ-NRT business class availability. She's also looking at whether a transfer partner route through a different program might get her to Japan at a better rate. The concierge surfaced a few options she hadn't considered.

She might still get her Tokyo trip. Just not the way she planned it.

The Honest Version of What I'm Building

I've been thinking about this a lot since the Aeroplan devaluation. The devaluation tracker catches changes after they happen. The upgrade monitor watches for opportunities on routes you care about. But neither of those fully solves the problem Priya had.

What she needed was something closer to a financial advisor for her points: something that looks at her balance, her goals, and the current state of the programs she's in, and tells her when she's sitting on a decision she should make now rather than later.

That's a harder product to build. It requires understanding intent, not just tracking balances. I'm not sure I've figured out how to do it well yet.

But Priya's story is why I'm trying.

If you've had a similar experience, where a devaluation caught you off guard or you missed a window you didn't know was closing, I'd genuinely like to hear about it. What would have made the difference? What would you have needed to know, and when?

You can reply directly to this post or find me in the MileIntel community. I read everything.

And if you want to set up an upgrade monitor for a route you're watching, it's free to try.