For our upcoming trip to Venezuela we had to transfer some of our points acquired with our Aventura Visa to Aeroplan. I thought the process would be easy. I thought there might be a web tool or some sort of easy to fill out form. Not so.

To transfer your Aventura points to Aeroplan you need to call the Aventura toll free line (1-888-232-5656 *hint* you need option '5' in the call menu). You'll get to talk with a friendly agent. Once you iniate the transfer the agent will let you know that it takes 5-7 business days to complete the transaction. This was a bit of a shock as we needed to buy our tickets right away. What could we do though?

Seven business days went by and no points showed up in our Aeroplan account. I spent the next two days on hold with both Aeroplan and Adventura. After getting the run around by a few people I finally lucked out and got nice people on the phone at both companies. What I found out is this: Aeroplan enters points it receives from Adventura the day after it gets them. From what I could tell Adventura is slow in sending the points.

Due to their slowness Adventura rushed a notice over to Aeroplan and somehow allowed me to book before the points actually showed up on my account. Their slowness was costly. We missed our desired flight and had to change our dates by two days. They reimbursed us a relatively small number of points to make up for it.

So a few hints for all of you who are going to transfer points in the future:

• Transfer your points long before you need to book
• You can only transfer your points in 10,000 point increments
• If your points don't show up in the time they said they would call back until you receive a friendly person
• Be nice to the people....they have to answer the phone all day
• At Aeroplan it's very hard to get to talk with a manager. Instead of asking to talk with a manager yourself simply ask the person you're speaking with to ask their manager for help with the issue.