Many members use Aegean’s Miles+Bonus for easy Star Alliance Gold-status qualification and their partner award redemption rates are pretty good as well.
There is an issue, however, with paid upgrades that Aegean sells under the “Upgrade Challenge” that are handled by Plusgrade.
You usually receive an email few days after you have booked your flight for an invitation participate in something called an “Upgrade Challenge” (at least I have received one for all A3 tickets that I purchased last month), which is not a challenge at all. You merely need to indicate a price you would be willing to pay for an upgrade to business (always choose the minimum).
There is an issue with these upgrades as to if they are accepted by Aegean. They won’t credit automatically to Aegean or any other Star Alliance frequent flyer program based on my two recent samples.
Even when you try to do a retrocredit on Aegean’s own website it merely returns a message that the fare class is not eligible for credit.
Conclusion
I just wanted to give heads up for readers who don’t want to waste time by going after Aegean or any other Star Alliance frequent flier program after upgrading one of the flights.
Aegean does credit these flights after you sent a note to the customer service with a note. It won’t, however, be that easy with partners because they need to contact Aegean first and get a green light from them. Expect this process to take weeks and multiple phone calls/emails.
I have used Plus Grade with number of airlines. Sometimes these paid upgrades book into the higher fare class and post as such while other times they keep the original booking class. Then there are instances such as this with Aegean that is a complete mess unfortunately.
