In late 2026, the Asiana Airlines brand will disappear, given that the airline has been acquired by Korean Air, as part of some major consolidation in the South Korean airline industry. With the brand disappearing, we knew that Asiana would leave Star Alliance, meaning the entire combined airline will become part of SkyTeam.
While that’s not news as such, what is noteworthy is the ridiculous way the airline plans to treat those with already ticketed award reservations, as those policies have just been published. I don’t ever recall seeing an airline take such a customer unfriendly stance.
Asiana screws over those with Star Alliance award tickets
Asiana Airlines has put out a formal notice about how it’s leaving the Star Alliance, and this contains all kinds of details regarding how the transition will work. Most of the details are roughly what you’d expect, regarding the end of the ability to earn and redeem miles, and no more elite perks when traveling on Star Alliance partners.
However, as noted by LoyaltyLobby, something in the FAQs is surprising:
I already ticketed a Star Alliance award flight using Asiana miles for travel on or after December 17, 2026. Since this falls outside the flight dates listed above, am I unable to fly?
Even if already ticketed, these tickets will no longer be valid for travel following our exit from Star Alliance. We recommend contacting the Asiana Airlines Reservation Center to review your reservation and discuss cancellation or alternative itinerary options. Affected tickets will be fully refunded and miles reinstated without penalty.
Just to clarify, this specifically seems to be for those redeeming Asiana Club miles for travel on other airlines, while there’s no indication that redeeming Star Alliance miles from other programs for travel on Asiana would cause tickets to be canceled. But who knows, maybe we’ll also see that, given this bizarre approach.
This is an unprecedentedly stingy policy
Generally when airlines leave an alliance, they lose access to award availability as of the exit date, which is fair enough. However, I can’t think of a single time we’ve seen an airline change alliances (or something along those lines) where already ticketed reservations weren’t honored.
This is unnecessarily punitive, because there’s no reason the policy needs to be this way. To be clear, it’s normal to not allow ticket changes to another flight operated by that alliance in these situations, but to not even honor existing tickets as booked? There’s simply no logic for this.
One wonders if this is actually what Asiana intends, or if someone who doesn’t actually understand this stuff was put in charge of coming up with these policies. How generous, though, that they’re promising to redeposit these tickets without penalty, eh?
It seems to me like this policy is even of questionable legality in some jurisdictions, given that the airline is just choosing to not honor already ticketed reservations without good reason.
Bottom line
Asiana Airlines will be exiting Star Alliance as of late 2026, which isn’t a surprise, given the integration into Korean Air, which belongs to SkyTeam. The implications here are mostly what you’d expect, with one exception — Asiana won’t honor already ticketed award reservations for travel on Star Alliance partners. I don’t recall an airline ever taking such a stance, and at best, this is extremely customer unfriendly.
What do you make of Asiana not honoring partner award tickets?
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