Aegean changes requalification requirements

This past July, I spoke how about to get Star Alliance Gold status quickly, and how to maintain it easily with Aegean Airlines. With the old program, all you had to do to maintain the status was to credit one flight, any flight, to your Aegean account, and your Star Alliance Gold status would be maintained for another 36 month period.

Aegean has announced serious changes to their Miles & Bonus frequent flyer program. The most substantial change is to the requalification requirements. Starting November 24, 2014 you can no longer credit just one flight per 36 month period to get your status renewed. The new program changes status periods from 36 months to 12 months. To keep your Gold status, you will have to either (a) credit 12,000 miles, which includes a minimum of four Aegean or Olympic Air flights, or (b) credit 24,000 miles from any Star Alliance partner airline.

For current status members, folks with Star Alliance Silver will need 16,000 miles or 8,000 miles with two Aegean/Olympic Air flights within the past 12 months to maintain their status. Current Gold members will be transferred to the new program, regardless of credited flight activity. It looks like they will get an additional year of Star Alliance Gold.

All in all, this is a pretty devastating change to this once lucrative program. However, Aegean will still maintain the lowest Star Alliance Gold requirements (24k instead of the normal 50k). Unfortunately, their redemption system isn’t the greatest, and it doesn’t look like the new program will change that much. Instead of being able to sink points once, and then only one flight per 36 months was extremely lucrative. Now we’ll have to decide whether maintaing Star Alliance Gold is worth sinking so many flight credits into the Miles & Bonus program.