One of the benefits of an alliance like Star Alliance is the ability to earn and redeem points or miles on all the other airlines in the group. As long as you’ve booked an eligible fare class, you should be able to earn points and status credits with your choice of frequent flyer program from any of the alliance members.

Miles+Bonus, the frequent flyer program of Greece-based Star Alliance member Aegean Airlines, is often a popular choice among Star Alliance flyers. If you fly at least a few times per year on Aegean, you can earn Star Alliance Gold status relatively easily. Aegean Miles+Bonus miles are also quite valuable.

So, when AFF member apeman booked a paid Business Class ticket on Thai Airways, they had every reason to expect they would earn miles when crediting the flights to Aegean Miles+Bonus. Thai Airways is another Star Alliance member.

The Thai Airways flights between Sydney and Bangkok were part of a mixed-carrier booking on Thai Airways and Oman Air, but the Sydney-Bangkok sectors were operated and marketed by Thai Airways. The ticket shows TG flight numbers, so these weren’t codeshare flights.

One was booked in Z class, and the other in D class, which the Aegean Airlines website shows are both eligible to earn Miles+Bonus miles.

Miles+Bonus refused to credit miles for these flights

With this in mind, you can imagine apeman‘s surprise when Aegean Airlines refused to credit the miles for these Thai Airways flights. This member wrote on the AFF forum:

My 2 Thai flights I expected points/Miles be added to my Aegean Miles and Bonus as they are part of the Star Alliance program. As no points/miles were not automatically added to my account, I raised my concerns with Aegean and was told as per some fine print they do not have to allocate points/miles bloody hell !! .
I took this up with Star Alliance and they basically flogged me off.

According to this member, the response from Aegean Airlines was as follows:

As outlined in the Terms and Conditions of the program on our website here, specifically in Chapter 13 AEGEAN Partnership with airline companies-members of Star Alliance, Paragraph 1, ‘Individual Star Alliance member-carrier’s may also exclude mileage accrual on certain flight-ranges’.

The flights TG 476/475 fall into this category and If you have any concerns or require further explanation, please contact the operating airline.

We often see cases where people are surprised to find that their ticket was ineligible to earn points because it was booked in an ineligible fare class. Some airlines won’t even show you which fare class you’re buying at the time of booking, so this is an understandable mistake. But according to Aegean’s own website, apeman‘s ticket should have been eligible to earn miles.

Frankly, the fact that the Aegean Miles+Bonus terms & conditions allow the program to unilaterally “exclude mileage accrual on certain flight-ranges”, whatever that means, seems like a cop-out. This lacks transparency. It’s not normal for a loyalty program to randomly refuse to credit points or miles for flights in eligible booking classes for no apparent reason.

In my opinion, there are two reasons that this could happen. One is that Aegean has simply made a mistake – but then doubled down and refused to correct it. A second possible explanation is that Aegean has a list of routes on partner airlines that it won’t credit miles for, but hasn’t made this list public. Neither scenario is great for Miles+Bonus members.

We tried to get an answer from Aegean Airlines

We’d love to know why Aegean refused to credit these flights, so we contacted Aegean Airlines for comment. Unfortunately, the airline never got back to us, so we still don’t know the answer to this conundrum.

To be clear, we’re not saying that Miles+Bonus is a bad loyalty program or that you should avoid using it over this one case. But we’ve written this article because we think frequent flyers deserve to know that this kind of thing could happen. It’s something to consider if you’re thinking of using Miles+Bonus as your main Star Alliance program.

Matt Graham

The editor of Australian Frequent Flyer, Matt's passion for travel has taken him to over 90 countries… with the help of frequent flyer points, of course!
Matt's favourite destinations (so far) are Germany, Brazil & Kazakhstan. His interests include aviation, economics & foreign languages, and he has a soft spot for good food and red wine.

You can connect with Matt by posting on the Australian Frequent Flyer community forum and tagging @AFF Editor.