FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Miles/Points that Do and Don't Expire
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Old Aug 29, 2015, 10:05 am
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sdsearch
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Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: home = LAX
Posts: 25,935
You need to be more specific about expiring. In some cases, it's just expiring with no activity, in other cases it's "hard expiration" which activity can't defer.

For an extreme example of that WyndhamRewards has two types of expiration: 18 months resettable by any activity, but 4 years "hard expiration" that can't be avoided.

Choice Privileges has only "hard" expiration, 2.00 to 2.99 years after you earn the points (on Dec 30 of two years from when you earn them). (Choice says "Dec 31", but they do it early in the morning of Dec 31, so it's much safer to think of it as "Dec 30"! )

Amtrak Guest Rewards (AGR) is changing soon. But up to now, it hasn't been reset by non-paid-Amtrak-travel activity. So people transferred points in, planning to use them for something, and found they expired almost immediately! Up to now, the only way to avoid Amtrak expiration as a rare Amtrak passenger has been to have the AGR credit card (from Chase up to now, but it may move to a different bank soon).

So a chart that simply says how long the expiration is will be misleading, IMHO. It needs an explanation of what (if anything) resets which (if there are multiple kinds) of expiration.

In airlines, an example of this complication is LAN: LAN kms expire three years after you earn them, not resettable by most activity, but all your kms reset for another three years if you take a paid LAN flight that earns LAN kms.

AA is 18 months resettable by any activity.
UA is 18 months resettable by any activity.

Btw, please note that "activity" in the context of expiration always means earning or redeeming in that program. One person over in the AA/US forum who had lifetime miles at US and then never flew US for years assumed that logging into their account occasionally counted as "activity", for the purpose of maintaining their account, but it didn't, and right before US Dividend Miles merged into AA AAdvantage miles, that person's US account was purged for inactivity, along with their lifetime miles.
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