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Here at InsideFlyer UK, we try to help you choose the frequent flyer scheme(s) that’s right for you. Most of our readers probably focus on British Airways Executive Club for oneworld flights – myself included. But some of us fly more with Star Alliance airlines, and so today I’d like to introduce you to the programme that provides a relatively easy route to gaining Star Alliance Gold status. Ever heard of Greek flag carrier Aegean Airlines? Some of you will and some of you won’t, but the airline was named “Best Regional Airline in Europe” by Skytrax in 2014 and its ‘Miles +Bonus’ loyalty programme is well worth a look if you are interested in Star Alliance Gold status.
Although Aegean only operates short and medium-haul flights within Europe, the Greek airline is a full member of Star Alliance, allowing you to earn and redeem miles on any Star Alliance member. It also means that once you reach Aegean’s top-tier status in its Miles + Bonus frequent flyer scheme, you will receive all Star Alliance Gold benefits on any Star Alliance airline.
I will introduce Aegean’s status levels in a minute, but let’s just get one thing out of the way. Achieving Aegean’s top-tier gold status, which will make you a Star Alliance Gold member, is relatively easy. You will only need to earn 36,000 tier miles on any Star Alliance carrier (including 6 segments on Aegean). Compare this, for example, to the draconian 100,000 status miles you will need in Lufthansa’s Miles & More frequent flyer scheme to achieve their Star Alliance Gold status equivalent, which they call “Senator”. Sure, as these are two different schemes, I submit that we are talking about comparing apples to pears here, but this is just to give you an idea of the different elite status qualification requirements out there.
Aegean Miles + Bonus benefits and tiers
So let’s briefly take a look at the tiers and benefits of Miles + Bonus:
As you can see from the list, the Blue tier–which all members get simply by joining–doesn’t actually get you that much.
Things start getting interesting from the Silver status (Star Alliance Silver) onwards. Not only will you now be earning a modest 10% tier bonus on any Aegean and Olympic flights, but you will be able to reserve seats free of charge at the time of booking. On qualification and re-qualification, you will also receive two upgrade vouchers as well as four vouchers to use the Aegean lounges at Athens, Thessaloniki and Larnaca.
As a Miles + Bonus Gold member (Star Alliance Gold), you will benefit from a 20% tier bonus on Aegean and Olympic flights, access to Aegean and Star Alliance lounges and priority baggage handling, as well as a more generous luggage allowance. You can also use fast-track security lanes, priority boarding lanes and priority check-in facilities. You will receive four upgrade vouchers on qualification and re-qualification. See table above for a full list of benefits.
So how do I qualify “relatively easily”?
The first hurdle you will need to take, in order to qualify for Gold status, is to achieve Aegean’s Silver tier. For this, you will need to earn, within 12 months, 12,000 status miles (including 2 Aegean or Olympic Air segments) or 24,000 status miles on any Star Alliance airline (no Aegean or Olympic Air segments required).
Once you have qualified for Silver, you then have another 12 months to achieve Gold. You will need to earn an additional 24,000 status miles (including 4 Aegean segments) or 48,000 status miles on any Star Alliance airline.
Why is this relatively easy to achieve? Well, look at the mileage accrual rates in the examples below:
You can check the earning rates for all Aegean Miles + Bonus partner airlines on this page here.
As you can see in the examples above, a business class flights earns you 200% of the miles flown in most cases, making the programme a great option for premium travel.
But check out the earning rate for SAS! You will earn a whopping 100% of miles flown in economy class, and a whopping 200% in SAS Plus (premium economy)! Let’s crunch some numbers here: imagine you fly from Stockholm to Los Angeles with SAS in premium economy. The distance between ARN and LAX is 5521 miles according to the airmilescalculator. You will earn 200% of miles flown, so 11,042 miles each way, or 22,084 miles for the return trip.
To qualify for Miles + Bonus Silver, you need 12,000 miles plus two Aegean segments. Just one segment in SAS Plus between ARN and LAX almost gives you enough miles to qualify for Star Alliance Silver! Build in two Aegean segments (from more or less anywhere in Western/Northern Europe) around a nice weekend trip to Greece, and you are there!
Remember that you would now receive your two upgrade vouchers, plus four lounge passes, which you can use of course in your efforts to qualify for the top-tier Gold status level!
To qualify for Gold, you need to earn an additional 24,000 miles and complete an additional 4 Aegean segments.
With your return SAS premium economy segment between LAX and ARN you will reduce the needed miles by 11,042, bringing the required grand total down by almost half! (You need 36,000 tier miles in total for Gold, minus the ~12,000 miles from your Silver qualification, minus the 11,042 miles from your return segment on SAS).
You could now book a standard economy return trip on SAS between, say Copenhagen and Los Angeles. According to airmilescalculator, the distance between the two airports is 5,624 miles. A standard economy class ticket will earn 100% of miles flown, so will earn another 11,248 tier miles for the return trip, putting you within touching distance of reaching Miles + Bonus Gold status.
Of course you still need to complete four segments on Aegean, but you can easily do this via a routing like this: Copenhagen-Athens, Athens-Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki-Athens, Athens-Copenhagen. And Aegean flights are cheap. Best of all, you can use your two upgrade vouchers (you got these when you qualified for Silver) to upgrade the longer Aegean legs between Athens and Copenhagen!
Let’s recap! It’s easily possible to gain Star Alliance Gold with only 10 segments: 1 premium economy return trip between ARN and LAX, 1 standard economy round trip between between LAX and CPH, and 6 segments on Aegean!
Easy re-qualification
Best of all, to re-qualify for Aegean Miles + Bonus Gold Status, you only require 12,000 status miles (including 4 segments on Aegean). Yes, only 12,000 tier miles. Do one long-haul standard economy class round trip on SAS and fly the 4 Aegean segments and you will have re-qualified. Remember that you could now upgrade these 4 Aegean segments into business of course thanks to the four upgrade vouchers you received when you initially qualified for the Aegean Miles + Bonus Gold tier. You will receive four upgrade vouchers, every single time you re-qualify for Gold!
Bottom line
If top-tier status with Star Alliance is what you are after, you should definitely consider Aegean’s Miles + Bonus scheme. The qualification criteria are relatively easy to begin with, and the re-qualification requirements are very easy to meet. To put it plainly, once you have achieved Gold status with Aegean, you wouldn’t want to give it up again. The cherry on the cake here really are the upgrade vouchers, which you can use to make your 4 Aegean segments more comfortable. And Aegean flights are cheap!
If I have piqued your curiosity, you can find out more about the Miles + Bonus scheme on this page here.
I will look at what you can do with your Aegean miles in another post. Stay tuned!
some airlines give airmiles on their partners but state that those don’t contribute towards status. The ones on agean definitely contribute towards status right?
Hi VK, yes, they count. There are some exceptions when it comes to fare buckets (mainly award tickets obviously). You can find out about these for each partner airline on this page: https://en.aegeanair.com/milesandbonus/how-to-earn/all-airlines/. The cheapest United “basic” economy bucket “N” earns no tier miles, but that seems to be the only exception.
For heavens sakes don’t give the game away… this is the best thing going! Once the others find out they’ll all be jumping on the bandwagon :-0
BTW, you might be off a bit with your calculations. If the ARN-LAX RT earns 22,084 miles then you will have 10,084 miles rolled over to count towards the Gold qualification. This assumes that you’ve already got the two A3/OA segments required for Silver status to be active after hitting 12K. So your total required for Gold would now be 24K-10,084 = 13,916.
Of course this assumes that you also have the two paid A3 segments but since you’ve flown those you must also have accrued at least 400 miles, but more likely at least 800 (since to get only 400 miles both flights would have to be solely within Greece).
So at this point you’d likely have no more than around 13,116 to qualify, plus the remaining 4 A3 segments. Most people reading this would get the 4 segments by doing something like LHR-ATH-XXX-ATH-LHR, where XXX = a Greek domestic airport such as HER or SKG. By the same logic as above this would get you at least 1200 (400+200+200+400) for the RT.
So now you have 4 segments done and only need (at most) 11,916 miles.
Another ARN-LAX would not quite get you there it seems, but in fact it’s likely to be enough. How? Because you probably already did LHR-ARN or MAN-ARN as a positioning flight for that – of course booking into SAS and then doing the reverse to get back to the UK. That’s a minimum of 1200 miles each time. Let’s say you’ve already done it for your first ARN-LAX so you actually have 11,916-1200 =10,716 to aim for. The same positioning flight for your next long haul trip (from ARN, CPH or OSL) will you give another minimum 600 miles (we only count the outbound leg at this point for simplicity).
Now you have to find a flight earning 10,116 miles from one of the SAS hubs. No point in going to LAX twice in a row so we can go east and do ARN-HKG instead. Great Circle Mapper gives that as 10,216 miles so you’ll hit Gold with 100 points to spare. Now you can fly back to the UK and wait a few days for your Gold status to post. That last flight home will have earned you at least 600 miles so once your Gold status goes live you need 12000-700 = 11300 to retain your Gold in the next qualifying year.
Now you can see why this program is best kept a secret 😉
Excellent summation Pangolin! (BTW, any confusion with the numbers is entirely the fault of my editing rather than rewardcollector’s work. Strict accuracy may have fallen victim to brevity on this occasion. Besides, you wouldn’t want us to spell things out too clearly, would you! 🙂 )
I think I would still argue that Turkish Airlines’ 40K in 12 months (on any *A airline) to get 2 years of status is more convenient than 36K miles and 6 Aegean flights.
But obviously there’s the added nuance of higher earning rates, such as the SAS example. And if you enjoy visiting Greece every summer there’s no hardship in picking up the Aegean flights…
The clincher for me is the 12K for tier renewal, which is an absolute steal once you’ve gone through the hurdle of qualifying (and this process is still less onerous than most, if you’re based in Europe). And if you can’t even make 12K for some reason you still have the option of buying up to 3000 tier miles as a Gold. For me the M&B scheme turns out to be a no-brainer as my travel patterns in Northern and Central Europe mean that I’m much more likely to fly SAS, which has fantastic accrual on A3.
My main worry is that A3 will repeat what they did in 2014 (which was absolutely necessary, BTW) and tighten up the scheme by making the re-qualification significantly harder. The previous rule change requiring domestic segments stopped the scheme from being overrun by US bloggers and their acolytes. Until they kill the current golden goose for Europeans, I’ll look forward to taking A3 flights with upgrade coupons in hand!
Yeah. Gold status for life was never sustainable. Requiring A3 flights is a good idea, but also tricky to do every year unless connecting via ATH is even remotely convenient.
I certainly agree that making it easier to re-qualify is a policy that is deserving of loyalty. BA’s “show me every year or we’ll make your travel miserable” policy makes “loyalty” seem rather one-sided.
Aye, Turkish is really good (especially if you play it like you did!) but the SAS earning rates for Aegean are fantastic. Also, I’ve noticed really cheap, oddly (long) routed, Aegean flights pop up quite often on ITA searches, so if you don’t mind an inconvenient routing or actually fancy a trip to Greece, it could work well.
One more thing: Aegean now lets you book any *A award online. No phone call needed!
https://en.aegeanair.com/milesandbonus/my-account/spend-miles/#award-ticket