Aegean Now Lets You Easily Transfer Miles Between Accounts

Aegean is one of the smaller Star Alliance airlines out there, though they have a lucrative frequent flyer program, even for those who don’t fly with the airline often. I’ve written about the Aegean Miles+Bonus program in the past, and what sets it apart:

• Aegean offers lucrative class of service mileage bonuses; for example, you can earn 200% elite qualifying miles for business class on many partners, when their own programs would award significantly fewer miles
• It’s easy to earn Star Alliance Gold status with Aegean — qualifying takes just 24,000 tier miles with four flights on Aegean OR 48,000 tier miles on partners, and requalifying for Gold takes just 12,000 tier miles with two flights on Aegean OR 24,000 tier miles on partners
• Aegean has generous Star Alliance award redemption rates, though they do impose carrier imposed surcharges on many partners (for reference, the Star Alliance award chart is below — prices quoted are roundtrip, and one-ways are bookable for half the cost of a roundtrip)

Best of all, they’ve been making efforts to improve the program even further recently. For example, Aegean now allows Star Alliance award redemptions through their website, which they didn’t previously. This is a huge value-add, since previously you had to call up Aegean to redeem miles on partner airlines.

Furthermore, Aegean has gotten more aggressive with selling miles, which can be a good way to top off an account so you have enough miles for a redemption. Through December 27, 2017, they’re offering a 40% bonus on purchased miles.

Well, now Aegean’s program has gotten even better in another way. As noted by Running With Miles, Aegean now lets you transfer miles between accounts at the fixed cost of 15EUR per transaction. Through this offering you can either transfer or receive anywhere between 1,000 and 50,000 miles per account per 12 months.

While Aegean previously allowed elite members to create a family account, that had restrictions and was also limited to elite members, so wasn’t useful across the board. This new feature is much more practical for the average person.

Why should you care about this? Because if you’re just casually collecting Star Alliance miles and are taking a trip with someone else, you could potentially get a lot more value out of Aegean miles if you have twice as many miles in a single account. Let’s say you find a good discounted business class ticket on Air Canada that covers a distance of 15,000 miles roundtrip per person, and you’re traveling with a spouse. Aegean would credit 200% miles for those tickets, meaning you’d get 30,000 miles in each of two accounts. Then you could combine those miles into one account, and you’d have enough for a one-way Lufthansa first class ticket between the US and Europe.

Anyone plan to take advantage of this new opportunity to combine Aegean miles?