Being a frequent traveller, with silver FTL status at Miles&More for longer than 5 years, I never got to the Gold card – even though this year, I flew 122 flight segments with them.
In short, to get faster to gold FTL within Staralliance, use Miles+Bonus (Aegean / Air Olympic). You will need about 18 economy flights to get to silver FTL, and another 36 economy flights to get to gold FTL. You’ll get twice as much miles for the same flights booking by using a Miles+Bonus card than with a Miles&More card (Lufthansa / SWISS airlines / Austrian airlines / LOT Polish airlines), and, with the later, you’ll need 30 economy flights to get to silver FTL, and about 180 flights to get to gold FTL.
Miles+Bonus Aeagean a Starraliance memberMiles and More Lufthansa a Starraliance member
With Miles&More, you get to silver FTL with 35 000 miles earned in a year (or with 30 flight segments)
With Miles+Bonus, you get to silver FTL with 12 000 miles earned in a year (if it includes 2 Aegean flights, otherwise 24 000 miles)
With Miles&More, you upgrade from silver to gold FTL with 100 000 miles earned in a year
With Miles+Bonus, you upgrade from silver to gold FTL with 24 000 miles earned in a year (if it includes 4 Aegean flights, otherwise 48 000 miles)
In the earlier times, it was possible to get gold FTL with Miles&More with 120 flight segments a year – this is not possible anymore, as I discovered in 2016.
To get to silver FTL with Miles+Bonus, all what was needed was to collected 12 000 miles (including some Aegean flights), which I did through only 18 flights segments – where Miles&More would have required 30 flights and 35 000 miles for the same result.
To get gold FTL with Miles+Bonus, I still need about twice what I did to get silver FTL, which means about 36 flights for 24 000 miles… whereas with Miles&More, even 122 flights for 67 000 miles weren’t enough to grab the gold FTL !
Not only Miles+Bonus requires less mileage to reach silver FTL or gold FTL, it also offers more mileage for the same flights – about twice as more as per below calculation.
Chart below shows mileage received from Miles&More (total of 8500 Miles&More miles for these 16 flights), and how much mileage it would have earned if used with a Miles+Bonus frequent flyer card (total of 15529 Miles+Bonus miles for these 16 flights), as per the Aegean Miles Calculator :
Activity / Partner code / Flight no. / Booking class
