The Best Ways to Earn Star Alliance Gold

Earning elite status with airlines can deliver extremely valuable benefits along your travels. But if you’re in the habit of redeeming Miles & Points for flights, rather than paying cash for them, then you’d be forgiven for thinking of airline elite status as beyond your reach. 

Indeed, perhaps it’s because our national airline, Air Canada, belongs to Star Alliance, but one of the questions I get rather frequently is whether there are any easy ways to achieve Star Alliance Gold status. 

Earning Star Alliance Gold offers additional benefits to travellers in any class of service, as long as they’re departing on a Star Alliance flight, and it can be very worthwhile to have the status, especially if you tend to fly in economy class. 

Why Is Star Alliance Gold Valuable?

Let’s begin with a point of clarification, since I know this can be confusing from the outset. Every Star Alliance airline has their own loyalty program (such as Air Canada Aeroplan, United MileagePlus, Avianca LifeMiles etc.), and each program is free to set any number of status levels and qualification requirements within its own program.

For example, Air Canada Aeroplan Elite status has five different levels beyond the basic tier: 25K, 35K, 50K, 75K, and Super Elite 100K. Meanwhile, a program like Aegean Miles & Bonus might only have two status levels: Silver and Gold. 

Now, each program also designates two different status levels to correspond with alliance-wide Star Alliance status. Air Canada, for example, has selected Elite 35K to correspond to Star Alliance Silver and Elite 50K or above to correspond to Star Alliance Gold, while Aegean Miles & Bonus has naturally chosen Silver and Gold, respectively.

When you earn Air Canada Elite 50K or Aegean Gold, you also automatically earn Star Alliance Gold, and are accordingly entitled to its benefits when travelling with any of Star Alliance’s 26 member airlines. 

While Star Alliance Silver doesn’t offer too many meaningful benefits, Star Alliance Gold is where the benefits really start to kick in, which include:

• Priority airport check-in
• Priority baggage handling
• Airport lounge access for you and one guest
• Priority boarding
• Extra baggage allowance (either an extra 20kg allowance, or an extra piece of baggage, depending on the airline)
• Priority Gold Track airport…