Earn Your Wings got me 580,000 Aeroplan Points!

I recently found out that I was Top 20 for Earn Your Wings with Air Canada, which awarded me with 580,000 Aeroplan points.

Here’s what Air Canada’s gamification promotion is all about. It’s set up to run over a period of 3 months, where you can book and fly flights in the first 2 months, then you can fly (but can’t book) anything in the last month. You earn points from badges as you go. For example, the Scenic Drive badge is awarded when every time you take off or land at any 2 of the 4 following airports to earn this badge: Victoria (YYJ), Winnipeg (YWG), Halifax (YHZ), Quebec City (YQB). That badge will earn you 2000 points in the game. There is a leader board to monitor how you are going against other players. At the end of the promotion and after everything has posted then those in the Top 20 positions will each earn about 500,000 points (plus the other points they earned along the way).

Watch this video is you want an insight to the Objective Based Gamification at Air Canada from gSummit.

This is the 4th edition of the Earn Your Wings promotion and I finally decided to try my luck.

This is an outline of some of my trips I took during for the promotion. You’ll note that most of these trips were purely for the game and I had no actual destination.

May 17
YYJ-YVR-YEG-YXE-YWG-YQR-YVR-YYJ

May 31
YVR-YEG-YXE-YWG-YQR-YVR-YYJ

June 6-7
YVR-YYJ-YVR-YEG-YXE-YWG-YXE-YVR

June 20
YYJ-YVR-YEG-YXE-YWG-YVR-YYJ

June 21
YYJ-YVR-YEG-YXE-YWG-YQR-YVR-YYJ

June 26
YVR-YWG-YUL-LHR

July 12
CDG-YUL-YVR

As well a couple YVR-YYJ segments to top up on Scenic Drive badges

I earned a total of 81,850 in game points which was JUST enough to get me in 20th place. Had I dropped below 73,200 then I would have landed in 21st place and lost the grand prize.

Here’s a summary of my badges:

The cost break down was about $3200 not including the Europe Trip. LHR and CDG was part of my summer holidays so I had planned to pay for those flight anyways.

To maximize the reward for my investment I will only book First class tickets with these points. Last year I booked Lufthansa First class (retail $12,000) for 125k AP + $995 taxes which is about 9.6 cents per point in value. This year I booked ANA, Thai, and Asian First on a single itinerary (retail $14,000) for 210k + $662 taxes which is about 6.3 cents per point in value. My average is in the middle at 8.0 cents per point (let’s say).

So the value of winning this contest is about 580,000 points x 8.0 cents per point = $46,400

Did I just win the lottery? cause it sure feel like it!

There was some degree of uncertainty and I did just make the cut off at 20th position! But would I do it again? Yes!

Read on about my First Class itinerary to Bali on Points.