Air Canada launches interactive fare finder to search for getaways using cash or points

Are you one of those people who likes to book trips on a whim? Or have a budget for travel and are open to go wherever that budget can take you? Well Air Canada has just released a beta version of an interactive graphical fare finder tool that is similar in vain to Google flights. The new tool allows you to input your departure city, dates of travel (with +/- 5 days of flexibility), your budget, what fare class you want to travel in and even travel interests like beaches, luxury & wellness and much more. The difference between Air Canada’s interactive tool from Google flights is that you can choose between cash fares and Aeroplan points. The latter is something Google doesn’t have and can make it really fun and easy to find some points deals faster than going to the Air Canada search engine and inputting each search separately!

I gave it a quick go and simply put YYC into the departure box and left all the others as is and came up with the following for cash fares:

And the following for Aeroplan points:

I then tried out ‘Trip Type’ and checked off Sandy Beaches to get the following results:

It also works for U.S. departure points, here’s Newark:

I tried Paris and Taipei as well but didn’t get any results but did so for Mexico City  so it does appear to only work for North American departure points at this time

Once you have the map up with the offers simply click on the one that interests you and it will take you to the booking engine on those dates. You can then log in and see your preferred Aeroplan points pricing if you looking at booking a reward flights.

You can access the fare finder tool at https://www.aircanada.com/en-ca/fare-finder and the points finder tool at  https://www.aircanada.com/en-ca/points-finder. Both of them also have a tab underneath the map that will let you switch back and forth between them. I would assume that the points showing on the map are the base level redemption amounts for members who don’t hold elite status and do not have an Aeroplan co-brand credit card.

The above maps were all done within the matter of minutes and I know I will spending a lot more time checking this feature out but I wanted to let all of you know as soon as possible so that you can all start having some fun with it and hopefully find some amazing deals!

Let us know in the comments section below if you find any gems, problems and/or what you think of this new tool from Air Canada!