I looked over the miles/points expiration wiki, the policy of many programs is just have some, even one activity to keep your points alive which sounds reasonable to me. The hard expiration policy seems draconian to me. Are these programs giving away too many points and need a method to reclaim some?? Overall, I think these marketing programs are ingenious on their part. Hotel programs have this game where they entice us to make status, but what does status cost the hotels? Almost nothing, elites get free upgrades on rooms that would have been empty anyway. It doesn't cost the hotel much more to clean a suite than a regular room. Free breakfast doesn't cost them much either, although they do give up the opportunity to gouge us by charging a high price for breakfast. Which brings up another issue with me. I never understood how it makes business strategy sense to antagonize your customers by charging $5-$10 for a bottle of water or the high cost of breakfast. We know we have to pay a premium for the convenience of having breakfast in the hotel or a bottle of water, but why have the price be so high that we the customers feel that we have been taken full maximum advantage of. I suppose if they all do this then they can sort of get away with it, but it also gives an entrepreneur an opportunity to figure out a way to enter the market. For example, if the taxi industry didn't have such a bad reputation for being rude and overcharging us, Uber/Lyft wouldn't have had as good of an opportunity to destroy their market.