Air Canada expands lowest-price guarantee / travel

If you surf websites such as Expedia and Travelocity to get the best fare for a flight, you have a new tool.

Air Canada's lowest-price guarantee, introduced this month, ensures that its website will yield the most advantageous deal. The existing offer for North American destinations has been expanded to include all 175 cities worldwide served by Air Canada.

"Our promise is that by going to aircanada.com, our customers will obtain the best price for all of our destinations," said Ben Smith, the airline's chief commercial officer.

"If they find the same flight elsewhere at a lower price within 24 hours of purchasing from Air Canada, we will provide a $50 travel credit plus a matching price."

There are two scenarios:

- If a traveller buys a ticket on aircanada.com and finds a cheaper price within 24 hours on another Canadian-based travel website, (for the same flight, itinerary and fare class), the airline will match the fare and pony up a $50 bonus plus the difference in price for use in future tickets bought on aircanada.com. To make the claim and receive a promotional code to access the rebate, customers will have to fill in detailed information online about the competing website's offer (for example, the site's URL or printouts or screenshots of the web page).

- In the second possibility, if a traveller buys a ticket on aircanada.com and finds a lower fare within 24 hours on the website, Air Canada will allow the customer to book the lower fare and cancel the original flight.

But this time, there won't be a $50 rebate.

In either case, the lowest-fare guarantee applies to tickets sold on aircanada.com for travel from Canada to all cities served by Air Canada, Air Canada Rouge or Air Canada Express routes via Sky Regional or Jazz. The offer is open to individual travellers as well as travel agents. Air Canada also is maintaining its policy of fully refunding any purchase within 24 hours. Details: http://ow.ly/i4Aam.

The world's 15th-largest airline, Air Canada carried about 35 million passengers in 2012. Its newest route will be Toronto to Istanbul, which starts in June.