Originally Posted by
marti8
Yeah. I realize that I was negligent....
Back in my head I heard that they could close your account and archive it; but never loose the right to your air miles in reality. They are your property. Maybe I'm wrong.
Welcome to FT!
I learned from our collected FT wisdom that it IS a
wrong assumption. Even though you may think we "earn" our own FF miles, but, in reality, FF miles/programs belong to the airlines and they can modify, change or even terminate the whole program as they desire.
Originally Posted by
marti8
..Best advise from one tread, to write a nice letter to them, and explain the problems I went through with my hard disk, maybe they are nice and allow me to reopen my account again...
Correct me if I am wrong. I don't think AA close your AAdvantage account. They just reset your account balance to zero due to 3-yr inactivity. In your case, AA just reinforced their 36-month expiration policy. You lost your miles, not your account. There's no need to "reopen" it.
I am not trying to be harsh. If you want to reactivate your expired AA miles for less cost (it sounds like it), you better come up with a much stronger "defense." Even it wouldn't hurt to try, I strongly doubt your hard-drive-problem excuse would fly at all. AA hasn't changed their 36-month inactivity policy for years. With a damaged/reformatted hard drive or not, the policy has always been 36-month period. Your email account issue won't be a stronger case either since providing a valid and usable email account to AA is a very easy task. Admitting your own negligence probably will get you as far as sympathy land but nowhere near your lost 174K miles.
IMHO, you have to pay AA in order to get your expired miles back, if you don't have the proof that you ever generated any AA miles in those 36 months. There's no way to get around it. The best case scenario would be AA offering you a special discounted rate to reinactivate your miles
IF you can build a very strong case. However, I don't recall reading success story from our fellow FTers on that account so far.
The following thread over Delta forum might help you build your case though. (I know, I know, AA is in a much better shape than Delta.) Delta Skymiles changed their expiration policy last summer and quite a few FTers suffered the loss of miles in the last couple months due to the change. Read through the posts. I am sure you will get some insight and good advice to avoid miles expired in general.
The Definitive “How Do I Extend the Expiration Date of My SkyMiles” Thread
Good luck!