PhlyingRPh

As I think back, I have left a lot of points/miles on the table during my life. Let me count the losses...

1) Sprint
I recall having a Sprint Long Distance affinity program in the nineties that had over 250,000 miles in it. Somehow, after a couple of moves that took place in quick succession and some laziness on my part, I lost those miles. Didn't exist anymore according to Sprint.

2) TWA
No explanation needed, but I lost a good 150,000 odd miles on that one and frankly saw it coming from the early 90's so should have known better. It was just that I believed Virgin was going to buy them out - silly me.

3) Citibank
Some years ago, I had a Citi card with a points program that morphed a couple of times. It eventually wound up being a program that awarded air tickets based on the distance traveled, one point equaling one mile of air travel.. So, if one wanted to fly DFW-ORD R/T, it would cost 1604 points. One year, Citi sent out replacement cards. I was living out of the country at the time and had not used this card for a number of months. When I returned to the U.S., I opened the envelope containing the Citibank card and called Citi to activate it. At that time I was told that since I had not activated the new card within 90 days of delivery and not made any charges on that account for more than 6 months, Citi had closed the account and I had forfeited my points.

3) Expired Delta miles:
A few thousand here and there lost due to expiration

4) Other Orphan miles:
Airlines I might have only flown once or twice. I consider these lost miles since I will never get to use them.

5) [added] United Mileage Plus miles:
In the mid-eighties, I flew United and BA quite a bit. BA miles were creditable toMileage Plus at the time. I had about 170,000 miles in MP and somehow never flew UA or BA for years, consequently losing those miles. Again, Laziness!

dglewis76

I remember signing up for E-Trade 5 years ago for miles but never received them and never followed up either due to my laziness.

BearX220

Many years ago, early 1990s, I racked up 30,000 or 40,000 miles in the Finnair program that I lost track of.

DillMan

You can rest assured in the future that without major changes there will be no foreign carriers purchasing major US carriers.

TrueBlueFlyer

I will be losing my 1.5 earned credits with Air Tran for one flight I took last August from Savannah to Atlanta and paid with an AMEX card.

Don't feel like applying for the Air Tran VISA to actually redeem a free roundtrip ticket.

--Russ

balima

Mr. Balima had 50,000 in United that somehow got "lost". After he told me I called United. 20 minutes and two agents later the 50,000 miles were returned to his account. Used them to upgrade to F on our 5th anniversary trip.

adamak

I can feel the pain even just reading it.
I lost some JetBlue miles. But then it's JetBlue, so it's not too bad.

coxta

For me, TWA and Pan Am. I miss flying those Pan Am planes.

nako

And yet, AA allowed TW members to transfer their miles over to AAdvantage for nearly two years following the takeover.

Mike

ctuttle

If memory serves me correctly you had a period of time where you could transfer it to American, and then when TWA LLC or whatever they called it stopped flying they automatically did it. I remember looking one day at my American account and something like 150,000 miles had been added because of the TWA "merger".

PhlyingRPh

Again, laziness

nako

If I recall correctly, it was the exact opposite -- they did the switch automatically for those persons who they could positively match through names and addresses, but those people whose miles weren't automatically transferred had to call and request the transfer to be done manually before a certain point.

Mike

Marathon Man

Here's my only true loss and it STILL may be fixable, but yeah, I am being lazy now too:

I had about 75k Hilton points. Would have eventually redeemed to say in NYC with wife for a room for some off peak weekend there but one day I looked and the points were gone. No wait, my account was gone too!

I had been transferring MyPoints over in blocks of 1,000 and these were saying they were successful. Acct showed them coming in and after a long period of my not looking at the Hilton side, something must have changed. Mypoints was still deducting as I ordered them to every couple of months, but it seems as though Hilton stopped taking the points. So where'd they go? Who knows! My Points only keeps records for up to 6 months back (stupid policy, I think) and Hilton denies everything (really stupid, I think!) I DO have in a dusty old spider-web-ridden box in my dark damp junk filled New England basement pretty much every record of every mile and point transaction I have ever done. I KNOW that records of these transactions are in there. I have been unwilling or unable to go down there and dig thru it all. If I do, I will also probably start trying to reorganize the basement and everyone who has a filled basement knows that this may not really be worth 75k points of anything. I dunno maybe it is, but if I ever do find those records and send them in, I bet they'd tell me it's too late now anyway. They wouldnt believe me about my basement anyway. But it's allllll down there!

MM

Motor Mouth

Had a UA award for me and my better half (80k miles) for October of 2001. Due to various things, we cancelled the trip and redeposited the miles. Forgot to pay attention to the expiration date, which was just a few months later. Could have bought them back, but decided against it since I was not flying UA much at the time. Lost about 90k.

HGHUA

I hate miles that expire