Originally Posted by Stefan Daystrom

My point was that SOME advance notice is no good if you are only SLOWLY accumulating and far from a threshold for a reward. That's what happened to me with (I think I now remember the name) Webmiles. They gave me several months to redeem, but I was only earning through grocery store purhcases, and was a COUPLE YEARS away at that rate from getting to a redeeming point (and it made no financial sense for me to do anything which would get me to the redeemable point in time), so effectively that warning was useless to me (except for the fact that it allowed me to switch grocery stores before the program went poof, if I wanted to, since I already knew I wouldn't be earning at the grocery store the program was tied to).

And I did have a similar thing happen to me with a "big name" credit card: The GM Card. They didn't go under, but they changed the award availability and took away the only awards I was interested in with again not enough warning for me to be able to get to the award level with anything close to normal or sane spending on the card. So the few months warnings again was useless to me.

Thus the point a couple other people have made that these kinds of programs are a completely different kind of risk to some who spends A LOT on the program (and thus is likely to be able to get to an award level within a few months if that's all the advance warning they get of discontinuation), but a lot worse risk for someone who can spend only modest amounts (groceries, gas, etc, but not rent or mortgage or business expenses or other BIG payments) and thus will take a year or two (or even more) each time to get to a redeemable amount of points. What good is three or even six months warning if at your maximum regular spending level you're a year away from getting to an award level??? (And thus for such people it's not sufficient to say they'll probably get some warnings, it matters whether the program will be around for enough years GUARANTEED.)

And, while, again, there's nothing really guarnateed about real FF programs, the fact is there is lots of historical precedent of FF programs being merged when airlines (well, at least, major airlines) go under, but there is NO historical precedent that I have ever heard of of credit-card-specific point programs being merged. That's because in the case of the real FF programs the miles currency is independent of any credit card product, and the database of FFers is of interest to others in the airline industry. But when a credit card's homegrown points program is abandoned, they don't want you to go to a competing credit card (they typically want you to stay within the credit card company and just switch to a different type of credit card they offer), so there's no database that anyone wants to sell, and so the points program just vanishes into midair. And meanwhile, if the credit card company is acquired in a merger, they've already got the customers, and in credit cards the points program is typically considered a side frill (as opposed to at many airlines these days the FF program is the only profit center!) so there's not a lot of thought always given to preserving the points program through the acquisition/merger, as long as the credit card customers per se are preserved (for the most part).