How to calculate miles earned to M&B
Short version
1. Find the distance flown
2. Find the fare class
3. For each segment, locate the fare class in your airline's table
on A3's site
Long version
This topic may be very well known to many, but this forum has had quite a few questions/misunderstandings/rants of how many miles a certain flight earns on A3, so I decided to write it down in detail. Even if it is in boring detail, if you are the least unsure on how to calculate miles, read this and hopefully you will avoid future disappointments.
When you fly a Aegean or a Star alliance partner flight, you will earn both tier-miles and award-miles on the A3 program. Here is a method of calculating the exact number of miles you will earn.
1. Find the distance flown *)
This number should be
a) obtained from the operating carrier,
b) quoted segment by segment,
c) quoted in miles and
d) without any kind of bonuses added.
Why?a) Different carriers have different sources of information and thus may have different views of how long the distance is. Some uses the
IATA table, some uses great circle distance, some uses a proprietary table. It is operating carriers view of the distance that determines how many miles you will earn.
If you are not bothered with the exact miles you can use the great circle distance. Just be prepared that earned miles may be higher or lower than this value.
b) Some carrier have their earnings table split into regions, like domestic, shorthaul and longhaul, and the earnings rules may differ for each region. So if you do a 2 segment trip, each segment may have completely different earnings rules.
(One segment is usually defined as a trip with one flight number. It is considered one segment even if you land one or more times, and fly on one or more planes as long as it has one flight number. In this special case you need to get the direct distance from origin to destination as if you didn't fly via anything. You will not earn miles for your factual route, but for the direct path between segment origin and destination
If you land and get on another plane with a new flight number, you have started a new segment.)
c) Because M&B is mile based. If you get qouted in km, you can multiply by 0,6214 to get an estimate (yes, that is a decimal comma. If you don't know what that is, you can safely multiply by 0.6214 instead :-)
d) Because you need the actual milage for each leg to do the calculation. If you use a milage calculator from any FF program, it will usually add bonuses for class of service and tier status and so on. That will completely screw your calculation up, as these bonuses only apply if you credit to that program. Especially meilenrechner.de or meilenrechner.ch have tricked many. If you use it,
make sure you get the miles from a 100% earning class for a member without any tier bonus.
If your ticket is marketed and operated by the same airline, this is normally easily found, quoted on your ticket and/or in the booking process.
However, if your flight is a codeshare flight, this task may be tricky. The fare class you are quoted when you buy a codeshare ticket is the marketing carrier's fare class. It may or may not be the fare class that your ticket is issued under on the operating carrier. Sometimes the marketing airline maps the real fare class to one of their own, and sometimes they use the operating carriers fare class as is. There is no standard way of finding out which, but sometimes one can obtain the booking reference on the operating carrier and from that work out the fare class.
Here is a repository of user reported fare class mappings, which may or may not help you finding fare class on codeshares:
http://www.wandr.me/Tools/StarAllian...e_Mapping.aspx
3. For each segment, find the earnings from A3's site
https://en.aegeanair.com/milesandbon.../all-airlines/
Go to A3 and find the chart for your operating carrier. For *A partners, you
need to click on the airlines logo, otherwise the table is not shown. Make sure you find the current table, as sometimes an older version co-exists. If the chart is devided into regions, look under the correct region sub chart for each leg. Find the fare class you obtained in #2.
If there is an accrual factor, multiply the segment miles by the factor. If the result is lower than the minimum (should there be such a column) you will get the value under minimum instead.
Do not apply accrual factor to minimum values, as this is already done in the table.
If there instead is a "Flat miles" value, you get the flat miles value for the segment, regardless of distance flown.
Do not apply accrual factor to flat miles.
Warning: If you cannot find the booking class under the operating carrier chart,
the earning is 0 miles.
Especially many 'P' fare classes does not earn, even though the service class is business.
Do not multiply your miles with any other factors. A3 M&B-program does not have any bonus factors that is not shown in the table. Operating carriers bonus factors only applies to their own programs and not to A3.
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For some *A carriers, there are many different subsidiaries operating flights for the main airline. Some of these operators earns according to main airline chart some does not. Here is an incomplete list of subsidiaries that earns on M&B:
*)
Based on recent FT reports it seems like Lufthansa's connecting train rides may as well earn points. They seem to earn according to normal flight table