Just about one year back, Star Alliance CEO Jeffrey Goh had raised the hopes of everyone who flies with a Star Alliance member carrier, about more benefits coming their way with perhaps enhanced elite tiers under Star Alliance. Right now, Star Alliance has only a Silver and Gold tier, but a Platinum, and maybe even a Star Alliance Diamond Club was talked about.
At the IATA AGM, which started in Seoul today, Star Alliance confirmed that they are no longer working on new tiers across the Star Alliance member airlines, but instead they were working on enhancing benefits for Star Alliance Gold and Silver members.
The new Star Alliance lounge in Rome FCO Airport
So, what could you expect as enhanced benefits? Star Alliance Gold Track, which is a benefit which is offered to Business & First Class passengers, and Star Alliance Gold frequent flyers could be one. The alliance already has the Gold Track rolled out to 200 airports at the moment, worldwide.
As per Star Alliance, this is coming from meetings with Star Alliance airlines, who indicated they would instead prefer to maintain their existing tiers rather than adding more tiers. And that is where the focus moved from creating new tiers to enhancing existing tiers.
Bottomline
Let’s hope to see Star Alliance go toe to toe with oneworld sometime soon. Till then, I feel the benefits of Star Alliance at the top-tier continue to be weak and should be enhanced alliance-wide rather than individual airlines pampering just their members.
What are your hopes from Star Alliance in the times ahead?
What’s your source for this? I doubt you were at IATA and from what you have ‘reported’ it would appear you have simply copied from the Australian Business Traveller article at https://www.ausbt.com.au/star-alliance-pauses-plans-for-new-platinum-diamond-elite-tiers, so shouldn’t you be naming Australian Business Traveller as your source and doing the right thing by linking back to their original story?
@David, Hi. Seth Miller from BoardingArea also wrote about it, and we linked back to his story. Trust this helps!