I'm currently a third of the way through a zero-to-gold run whose sole restriction is that it may only take place during weekends (because I wasn't about to burn vacation time to get to gold status).
Since I'm located in Switzerland, this makes it somewhat annoying and laborious to find reasonable prices on other *A flights to get out of the country over the weekend. As such, I decided to simply spam A3 flights with the Aegean Passes to get gold.
TL;DR is that for ~1500 €, within 3 weekends, I should be able to get gold status from nothing.
The crux of my strategy is the surprisingly affordable cost per mile of burning through Aegean Passes. For the route I've selected, it comes out to 0.056 € per mile, airport taxes included. Topping up any missing miles with tier mile purchases, coming at 0.075 € per mile.
I could possibly have found better costs after searching a while more and mixing in other *A airlines, but I can easily live with what I ended up with and I'm keeping it somewhat simple.
The first of three weekends was last week, and it went remarkably smoothly.
Cost breakdown :
ATH-GVA x6 Aegean pass with 30-day advance notice: 348.00 €
ATH-LHR x6 Aegean pass with 30-day advance notice: 486.00 €
Assorted taxes + fees for each journey of GVA-ATH-LHR-ATH-GVA: 156.71 € (total fees: 470.13 €)
extra 3000 tier miles (couldn't be bothered getting a 10x ATH-GVA pass for the remaining miles + renew progress): 225 €
Route breakdown (all times are standardized to CEST (GMT+2) ) :
Saturday:
- GVA-ATH: 11:20 -> 14:00
- ATH-LHR: 18:15 ->22:10
- LHR-ATH: 23:15 ->02:50
- This turnaround was trivial last week, took me 15 minutes tops between deplaning to being at the boarding gate; I was alone in the air transfer security lane, and the agents were quite surprised to see me there at that time.
Sunday:
Tier miles breakdown :
- 1000: Introductory miles
- 1616: Miles from each flight of the route ATH-GVA
- 2243: Miles from each flight of the route ATH-LHR
- 3000: Miles purchased out of laziness of running a 4th week-end the ATH-GVA route
Final cost calculation :
348.00 + 486.00 + (45.99+42.14+35.89+32.69)*3 + 225 = 1529 €
Final mile calculation :
1000 + (1616 + 2243) * 2 * 3 + 3000 = 27154
(Status upgrades are still 25% miles off at this time, this route won't work once that offer is gone after 31/05/2023)
27154 - 9000 = 18154 for silver tier up
18154 - 18000 = 154 for gold tier up