Do Any eSIMs Earn Aeroplan Points? We Searched the eStore and Ran the Math

There is no eSIM store that pays you Aeroplan points. Not ours, not Airalo's, not anybody's.

That is the finding, and it holds after searching Air Canada's own shopping portal rather than a third-party partner list. The question is worth asking anyway, because the follow-up question is the useful one: if you buy a travel data plan on an Aeroplan card, what do you get, and does it cover what the card charges you for buying in a foreign currency?

What is in the Aeroplan eStore, and what is not

The Aeroplan eStore is the earning portal: you start a shopping session there, click through to a partner retailer, and points post against the purchase. Air Canada describes it as the place to earn on online shopping, and CIBC advertises earning twice at over 150 Aeroplan partner brands and 170+ online retailers through it. That doubling is real and it is worth using. It just has nothing to earn on here.

We checked on 2026-08-23. Searching the store for "eSIM" returned "Your search for eSIM did not get any result." Searching for "Airalo" returned the same. To make sure the search worked at all, we searched "roaming" and got four items back, all of them Nintendo games and Sonos speakers matching on the word Roam.

Then we opened the retailer directory and filtered it to Activities & Travel, the category any connectivity brand would sit in. It returned 25 retailers:

The airline-loyalty eSIM deals that do exist

Aeroplan's absence is not because loyalty programs find eSIMs uninteresting. Two partnerships in the last eighteen months prove the opposite, and both are with the same eSIM company.

In July 2025, Airalo announced a partnership with Air Miles paying Collectors one Air Miles Reward Mile per C$1 spent, provided you buy through a dedicated Air Miles landing page rather than the ordinary Airalo site. In February 2026, Airalo and Cathay announced a tie-up paying 100 Asia Miles for every eSIM purchased alongside a preferential rate, and Cathay lists it on its own partners page.

Neither helps an Aeroplan collector. Air Miles and Asia Miles are separate programs with separate currencies, and neither is interchangeable with Aeroplan. If your goal is loyalty currency on a data plan and you are indifferent to which currency, the Air Miles route is the one that exists in Canada today. If your goal is Aeroplan specifically, there is nothing to route to.

One caveat on the Air Miles offer worth stating: we could not find an official Air Miles or Airalo page documenting it. The Airalo landing page for Collectors is served through an affiliate link, and Airalo's own media centre does not list the announcement. The launch coverage is credible Canadian trade press, but check the terms on the landing page before you count on the earn rate.

What an Aeroplan card pays you on a data plan

Since the store gives you nothing, the card is the only lever. Here is what each Aeroplan-branded personal card in Canada earns on a purchase that is not gas, groceries or Air Canada, which is where a data plan falls. Amex Membership Rewards cards earn Aeroplan too, by transfer rather than directly, and they get their own section below.

Read the right-hand column against one number: 2.5%.

That is the foreign currency fee. TD's Information Box for the Aeroplan Visa Infinite application states it as 2.5% of the transaction amount, charged on top of whatever rate the payment network used. CIBC's Summary of Annual Interest Rates and Fees states 2.5% of the converted amount, on both debits and credits. American Express Bank of Canada converts through an affiliate and adds a conversion commission whose percentage lives in your card's information box rather than in the agreement itself, so check yours.

Put the two columns together and the answer falls out. If your eSIM store bills you in a foreign currency:

• 1 point per $1.50 (the no-fee CIBC card, the TD Platinum): you are about 1.2% behind.
• 1 point per dollar (the $120 to $139 cards): you are 0.5% behind.
• 1.25 points per dollar (the three $599 cards): you break even.

Nobody comes out ahead. The best available outcome on an Aeroplan card is that the points cancel the fee, and that outcome costs $599 a year to hold.

The cards that earn Aeroplan without saying Aeroplan

The table above is every card with Aeroplan in its name, which is not the same thing as every card that earns Aeroplan points. American Express Membership Rewards transfers into Aeroplan at 1:1. Amex publishes the ratio on its own transfer page: 1,000 Membership Rewards points become 1,000 Aeroplan points, with a minimum transfer of 1,000 points and an estimated transfer time of up to 30 minutes. Aeroplan is one of only two airline partners on that page transferring at par, alongside British Airways Avios. The rest run 1,000 to 750.

So if you carry the Cobalt, the Platinum or the Gold Rewards Card, you are an Aeroplan earner whether or not the word appears on the card. That widens who this article is about considerably, and it changes the arithmetic not at all.

The Cobalt is the one most Canadians hold. Amex lists it at $15.99 a month, $191.88 a year, earning 5X on eats and drinks, 3X on streaming, 2X on gas and transit, and 1X on everything else. A travel data plan is squarely in "everything else". One Membership Rewards point per dollar becomes one Aeroplan point per dollar at par, which is the same 2.0% at a 2-cent valuation as the TD and CIBC Infinite cards, running against the same Amex conversion commission. Different route, same destination.

One footnote for anyone who read the Airalo section and did the obvious sum. The same Amex table transfers to Asia Miles at 1,000 to 750, so Membership Rewards can reach the currency the Airalo and Cathay partnership pays out in. It cannot reach it through an eSIM purchase, because that partnership pays Asia Miles at the till and Amex pays Membership Rewards on the card, and neither knows about the other.

One purchase, all the way through

Concrete beats general. Take a Europe+ 10GB plan valid 30 days, $17.99 USD from our live pricing on 2026-08-23, paid on a TD Aeroplan Visa Infinite.

Twelve cents. That is the entire prize for getting this decision right or wrong, and it is the reason we would rather spend the rest of this article on something that matters.

There is one way to flip it, and it is not the card. If the store bills you in Canadian dollars, there is no foreign currency fee at all, and the same card's 1 point per dollar becomes a clean 2% return with nothing working against it. So the question to ask at checkout is not "which card" but "which currency". Our checkout bills in USD, which is why the fee applies to us.

The number that is 150 times larger

While you were deciding which card earns 25 points, there was a $75 decision sitting next to it.

Rogers sells an International Travel Pass at $100 CAD for 14 days covering its 180+ Roam Like Home destinations, and a US pass at $60 CAD for 14 days. Those are the alternatives to a travel eSIM on a two-week trip, and they are the reason travellers go looking for eSIMs in the first place.

Put both sides in Canadian dollars at the same Bank of Canada rate and the gap stops being abstract:

The Aeroplan points on that same purchase are worth about 50 cents. The connectivity decision is roughly 150 times larger than the loyalty decision, and it is the one nobody researches, because points are interesting and data plans are not.

The two also settle differently. The $75 shows up as a smaller number on the statement that month, with nothing to claim and no minimum. The 25 points sit in an account until they join 975 others, and they are worth 2 cents each only if you redeem them well. If you are optimizing anything on this purchase, optimize the line that is three digits long.

Where Aeroplan points are worth chasing

Nothing here argues against Aeroplan cards. It argues against pointing them at a data plan.

The bonus categories on these cards are gas, EV charging, groceries, dining, travel and Air Canada, at 1.5 to 3 points per dollar depending on the card. Those categories are where the earn rate justifies the annual fee, and none of them is connectivity. The eStore doubling is worth using, on the 170+ retailers where it applies. Air Canada purchases on an Amex Aeroplan Reserve earn 3 points per dollar and post in Canadian dollars, with no conversion fee in sight. On the Membership Rewards side the same logic holds one step removed: the Cobalt's 5X on eats and drinks is where that card earns its keep, and every one of those points transfers to Aeroplan at par whenever you want it to.

A travel eSIM is a $10 to $25 purchase in a foreign currency in a category no Aeroplan card rewards. Buy it on whatever card is convenient, and put the effort into the flight.

There is one thing worth checking on the card first, and it is not the points. Every Visa in the Aeroplan lineup carries a GigSky eSIM benefit through the payment network: the Infinite cards get one complimentary 1GB plan a year, the Infinite Privilege cards get two, and the Platinum and no-fee Visas get a discount only. The Amex Aeroplan cards get nothing, because American Express runs no Canadian equivalent. That benefit is worth more than the points on this purchase and almost nobody claims it, so we wrote up what each card actually includes.

What we sell, stated plainly

We sell travel eSIMs. We are not an Aeroplan partner, we are not in the eStore, and we do not award Aeroplan points, Air Miles or any other loyalty currency. Our checkout bills in USD, so a Canadian card will apply its own foreign transaction fee to the purchase.

We could have written this article as a pitch for a rewards programme we do not have. The reason not to is that you would find out from a statement three weeks later, and the version of this you can check is worth more than the version that flatters us.

What would change this answer

Three things, and they are all checkable.

An eSIM retailer joining the Aeroplan eStore would make the whole calculation different overnight, because eStore rates run from 1 to 20 points per dollar and even a modest rate would swamp a 2.5% fee. Airalo's existing appetite for loyalty partnerships makes it the obvious candidate. The place to check is the retailer directory, filtered to Activities & Travel, which took us about a minute.

An Aeroplan card dropping its foreign transaction fee would turn every earn rate in the table above into a straight positive return. No Canadian issuer has done it on an Aeroplan card so far, and Scotiabank, which does issue no-FX cards, does not issue Aeroplan ones.

A large devaluation or revaluation of Aeroplan points would move the break-even. At 2.5 cents per point the 1.25x cards go from break-even to half a percent ahead. That is still twelve cents on a $25 plan, so it would change the sign of the answer without changing what you should do about it.

If any of those change after 2026-08-23, the links in the sources list go straight to the pages we read.