Asiana Leaves Star Alliance on 16 December 2026: The Claim Process Is Out, and Three Award Deadlines Have Moved

Asiana Airlines leaves Star Alliance at 23:59 Korea Standard Time on 16 December 2026. That date has not moved. On 30 September Asiana published a claim process for Star Alliance partner flights flown from 16 October, and changed three partners’ award deadlines: Copa and ANA later, LOT earlier.

If you saved the partner table from our original article, replace it with the updated version below: three airline deadlines have changed. The one that matters most is LOT Polish Airlines, whose deadline has come forward by more than three weeks. The earliest date of all is unchanged: 15 October 2026 is the last departure date on which another Star Alliance airline’s programme earns miles on an Asiana flight.

Asiana is leaving because it is being absorbed by Korean Air, a SkyTeam member. The integration completes on 17 December 2026, and Asiana keeps its Star Alliance membership until the day before. This is an airline following its parent from one alliance into the other, not a dispute with the alliance.

The deadlines, by what you are trying to do

Asiana publishes its schedule airline by airline. Reorganised around the decision a member is actually making, it looks like this. Each row stands on its own.

Earning, spending and status now end on different days, in different directions, across two alliances. Our status-deadline tracker covers other programmes’ qualification and expiry dates alongside these.

The claim window, and the gap in front of it

The new process is manual. For a Star Alliance partner flight departing between 16 October and 16 December, Asiana will not credit miles from the membership number in your booking. Under the 30 September notice you claim after flying, on the Earn Missing Miles page of flyasiana.com, and you need two documents: the boarding pass and the e-ticket receipt. Asiana asks members to keep both until the miles have posted, and estimates three to five business days for processing.

Three practical consequences follow, none of them spelled out in the notice.

Nothing can be claimed until 2 November. A partner flight on 17 October waits more than a fortnight before the form opens. Keep the paperwork where you will find it. Mobile boarding passes tend to vanish from wallet apps once the flight has gone, so take a screenshot or keep the airline’s email, and download the e-ticket receipt while the booking is still easy to find.

The window closes at 17:00 KST on 16 December, which is also the last eligible travel date. Because a claim can only be made after the flight, the published rules leave an unresolved problem for any partner flight that finishes at or after 17:00 KST on 16 December, including one that departed earlier that day; the notice gives no exception, so ask Asiana how such a flight will be handled before you rely on it. If you have Star Alliance flights in the final weeks, claim each leg as soon as it has flown rather than batching everything at the end, so that a rejected claim still leaves time to resubmit.

There is no reverse route. If you fly Asiana between 16 October and 16 December and hold a KrisFlyer, United MileagePlus or Aeroplan account, there is no claim to make. The notice marks the direction as unavailable and refers members to their own programme for details. For KrisFlyer that also means no Elite miles, because Singapore Airlines’ qualification rules award Elite miles only on flights that accrue KrisFlyer miles. If the flight is part of a status plan in another programme, confirm how that programme treats it before you keep the booking.

Spending Asiana miles on Star Alliance partners

This is the table that changed. Each date is the last day to ticket, in Korea Standard Time, and for every group except the last it is also the last day of travel, by flight date. Asiana applies the same dates to upgrades bought with Asiana miles on these partners.

Four details sit underneath it.

Three days, not the calendar date. Every award must be booked and ticketed at least three days before the first departure. The working deadline for a flight on 16 December is therefore 13 December.

LOT is the change to act on now. Any new LOT award must be ticketed and flown by 5 November. If you already hold a LOT award for travel between 6 and 30 November, boarding is guaranteed if it was booked and issued on or before 30 September; check the issue date on the e-ticket. If it was issued later and cannot be flown, Asiana refunds tickets that cannot be used because of the partnership ending in full, with miles re-credited and no refund fee.

The long tail opens on 15 October. Awards on Aegean, Avianca, Croatia and Turkish for travel on or after 17 December 2026 open for booking on 15 October 2026, for flights within roughly 355 to 360 days of the booking date. So a Turkish Airlines award for spring 2027 can be ticketed with Asiana miles from mid-October, provided it is ticketed by 16 December. Asiana’s June notice said already-issued Star Alliance awards for travel from 17 December would not be valid; for these four carriers the September notice supersedes that, and any other partner award dated after 16 December is still caught by it.

From 17 December the door shuts on changes too. Asiana says no new tickets and no itinerary changes will be possible from that date, only refunds within the ticket’s validity, and miles that have passed their expiry date by the time of a refund are forfeited rather than restored. A long-dated Turkish award with no flexibility is therefore a ticket to be confident of before you buy it.

Asiana also warns that a partner can cancel an already-issued award under its own policy, and asks members to confirm flight status and travel eligibility with the operating airline before boarding. That is unusual language for a notice of this kind, and worth taking literally: check the booking on the operating carrier’s own site a week before departure, and again the day before.

What happens to status

Star Alliance elite recognition for Asiana Club members runs to flights departing on or before 16 December 2026, with no earlier cut-off. Lounge access, priority check-in and extra baggage on partner airlines continue until then.

From 17 December Asiana is part of Korean Air, and the June notice says elite benefits carry across rather than lapse. The Korean-language version is the broader statement: every Asiana Club elite member is matched on 17 December to the corresponding Korean Air SKYPASS elite tier, and keeps lounge, check-in and baggage benefits on SkyTeam airlines according to that tier. The English version is specific at the top: Diamond and above, currently Star Alliance Gold, becomes SkyTeam Elite Plus “without any gap in benefits”.

Korean Air has published which SKYPASS tier each Asiana tier becomes, including a new tier created for Diamond members; our companion piece on the integration carries the full ladder. Diamond and above keep top-level alliance recognition through the match, but lounge eligibility and other benefit conditions differ between the alliances. If your 2027 plans rest on a lounge door at a partner airline, check your matched tier, its validity and SkyTeam’s rules for that itinerary before you book around it.

Accrued mileage balances and their existing expiry dates are unchanged by the exit itself. If you are not certain what your own expiry date is, our points and miles expiry reference sets out how each programme’s clock is defined and what restarts it.

The Singapore and KrisFlyer read

For a Singapore-based traveller the two directions of this change pull apart.

Earning stops on 15 October. KrisFlyer earning on Asiana-operated flights ends with departures on 15 October 2026, and there is no claim route afterwards. If autumn Seoul trips on Asiana were part of a plan to reach KrisFlyer Elite Silver at 25,000 Elite miles or Elite Gold at 50,000, those sectors no longer count. Re-run the arithmetic now. The alternatives are to move the flying to Singapore Airlines or another Star carrier, or to make up the gap through the ground-spend route into KrisFlyer Elite, which can supply up to 20 per cent of the Gold requirement. Our KrisFlyer Elite Gold guide sets out the full qualification picture.

Spending runs to the end. Singapore Airlines sits in the 16 December group, so an Asiana balance can still buy a Singapore Airlines award until then, ticketed at least three days before departure and flown by 16 December. ANA now sits in the same group, which helps anyone who had been eyeing a Tokyo routing.

Your Asiana miles are not lost after 16 December. The balance stays; the Star Alliance options for it go. What those miles become inside Korean Air SKYPASS, at what ratio, and which consents and deadlines apply before 17 December, is in our companion piece on the approved Asiana and Korean Air mileage integration. Asiana confirmed in its notice of 15 September 2026 that the integration plan was approved by Korea’s Fair Trade Commission and that the integrated programme takes effect on 17 December 2026.

If the bigger question is which programme to anchor on once Asiana is no longer a Star Alliance option, our comparison of the best frequent flyer programme for Singapore-based travellers and our head-to-head on KrisFlyer against Asia Miles and Avios are better starting points than a single route.

The difficulty is not any single rule. Earning ends on 15 October, claims open on 2 November, awards close on four different dates and status changes alliance on 17 December, each in a different programme. Seeing a year of booked flights against the thresholds and dates they feed, which is what Miles Mosaic does across the 31 programmes it supports, is how you notice in October that a November trip no longer counts. It is the same failure mode as crediting a fare that quietly earns nothing: the flight happens, and the number does not move.

What to do, in order

1. Now: if you hold a LOT award booked with Asiana miles for travel after 5 November, confirm it was issued on or before 30 September and check it on LOT’s site. If it cannot be flown, Asiana refunds it in full.
2. Before 15 October: check every Asiana flight in your calendar. Anything departing after 15 October earns nothing in another Star Alliance airline’s programme. Decide whether to keep the booking on that basis.
3. From 15 October: if you want a 2027 award on Turkish, Aegean, Avianca or Croatia with Asiana miles, booking opens. It must be ticketed by 16 December.
4. By 28 October: if you were saving Asiana miles for Lufthansa, SWISS, Austrian, Brussels or Air New Zealand, ticket now. Three days’ notice means the last flight you can book is on 31 October, ticketed by 28 October.
5. Before 23:00 KST on 31 October: audit this year’s Asiana and partner flights for missing miles, in both directions. That window does not reopen.
6. By 2 November: ticket any new LOT award; 5 November is the last flight date, and it needs three days’ notice.
7. From 09:00 KST on 2 November: claim Asiana Club miles for each partner flight flown since 16 October, with boarding pass and e-ticket receipt.
8. By 27 November: ticket any Air India, Ethiopian or EgyptAir award; 30 November is the last flight date.
9. By 13 December: ticket any remaining Singapore Airlines, ANA, United, Air Canada, EVA, Thai or Copa award for a flight on 16 December; earlier flights still need three days’ notice.
10. By 16 December (KST): ticket any 2027 award on the four long-tail carriers.
11. By 17:00 KST on 16 December: submit every remaining partner-flight claim.

Alliance departures are usually reported as a change to a logo on a lounge door. This one is a set of one-way doors closing on different days, and the 30 September notice moved three of them. The same pattern, a date published before the procedure behind it, is one we covered in loyalty deadlines without rules; here, at least, the procedure has now arrived.