cruise -no flights!!

Since you are using Aeroplan miles, I'd suggest using the United booking engine to check for availability on free tickets. It is a great booking engine and you can run a lot of different searches quickly. If you are able to find something that works, then call up Aeroplan and see if they can book it for you. Look at a map or go to the Star Alliance website to see what near by airports are served both at your origin and destination to broaden your chances of finding a frequent flyer seat. Alternatively, go and get some help on Flyertalk.com.

When you say you "can't get a flight to London," do you mean there are literally no seats on these flights? That's hard to believe; from Montreal there should be nonstops on British Air and Air Canada, and with one change, you would have tons of options (you can connect in Halifax, Toronto, Ottawa, Boston, Newark, JFK, Philadelphia, or Dulles, just to name some of the closest places). At least one of these routes will have space <g>. Or do you mean that you can't find one at a price you find acceptable? If that's the case, you try looking at a flight to Bristol or Birmingham, which you can reach from Montreal with one change. They are each a couple of hours from Southampton, as is London itself (and its airports). Are you using http://www.kayak.com or http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ to look for flights? These are multi-site searches, that will search airlines' own websites, as well as online agents (like Orbitz) and consolidators (like Vayama.com). If you have tried these and are still having trouble, post your dates of travel and your price point, so others can help.

We are having a problem using our loyalty points (aeroplan) for a return flight from London to Montreal. We would like to find out which other airports are close by (We checked paris & Brussels and no luck)

That's a horse of another color. Frequent flier seats are simply not always available. But this keeps changing (seats are released in batches), so it's worth trying repeatedly. You didn't say when your cruise was; at a certain point, if there are still no mileage seats, you will want to book seats for money, so you don't end up with extremely high prices. Have you called Aeroplan? You can often get seats on the phone that aren't shown on the websites. These may involve AC's partners, like United and Lufthansa, and you may have inconvenient connections (they once wanted to route me from New York to Paris via Istanbul). If you don't get a helpful phone agent, hang up and try again; you'll get a different and hopefully more helpful one. Besides Bristol and Birmingham, there are airports in Cardiff and Manchester, and (further north) in Edinburgh and Glasgow. For your purposes, the airport has to be served by an airline in the Star Alliance. Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh are, but Cardiff and Bristol aren't (at least according to the lists on their Wikipedia pages). Good luck!

Mileage award seats are hard to find these days.. Try calling like Harold suggests, and be willing to accept alternate dates. You may have to fly through a different airport--Toronto or Boston or someplace else--- to get to London. Some people suggest posting your question onFlyer Talk in the forum for your mileage plan to learn some tricks.

Thank you all so much for the advice and help!! We will start our research and see what happens.

Maria,, when exactly is this cruise,, because if you are cutting it close you may not be able to use points at all. PS did you check Airtransat, they are usually the cheapest for me from here and I know they fly out of Montreal too.

Is Manchester a possibility?

With Air Canada: Also try Munich to Montreal, with a cheap flight from London to Munich. London to Ottawa. London to Toronto.
Paris to Toronto. With United, try with a connection (or two). With Lufthansa, try with a connection (or two).

Another possibility, try flying out of Toronto or even Buffalo. It's always hard using air miles. I seem to amass them and never actually use them - which is why I normally shop best flight deals rather than stay loyal to one carrier.

Air Transat only flies once a week between London & Montreal but 5 or 6 times a week between Toronto & London so you might get a flight to London from TO. Probably you could use your Aeroplan miles on Air Canada to get to Toronto from Montreal. Good luck.