jsloan

:blush: Thanks for the shout-out.

It's actually a little bit more nuanced than that, unfortunately. Here's the specific language from the Star Alliance site:

There's enough wiggle room there to drive a truck through.

In this case, Aegean is following the model pioneered by Silk Air (happily, soon to be discontinued), Thai Smile, Eurowings, etc. -- they're operating a separate airline, outside of Star Alliance, and then sticking their code on the flights. Flights operated by those airlines, even if they're visually indistinguishable from the Star Alliance airline flight, are considered outside of Star Alliance and *G benefits don't apply.

However, this particular case has a somewhat happy ending; Olympic Air was recently added as a Star Alliance Connecting Partner. (That's what the line regarding "connecting flights" is about). If you fly a nonstop OA route, you won't get *G benefits. If you connect from OA to another *A airline, including A3, you should. Here's a link to a forum thread about this topic: https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unit...s-partner.html

Unfortunately, saccoNY, because you were on separate tickets, OA wasn't contractually obligated to provide *G benefits. I've never flown OA, and I can't comment on how likely it is that a different agent might have seen the situation differently and waived the fee, but I doubt you'll have much success complaining about it, sadly.