Apologies for hijacking this thread - I find myself perilously close to losing a not insignificant balance of my mileage account on 31st December. I assume the lifetime miles I hold will still be safe though.

As a precautionary measure, I flew on a paid ticket with LH on 1 December adding my MP account number into the reservation. However, this activity has not shown up in account yet and as the days are ticking forward I feel a further measure on my part is called for to rescue the miles from oblivion, accepting the cold fact that a manual mileage credit can take up to two months to post.

The advice I received today from my local MP call centre (UK) is that I should expect to see my miles expire at the end of the month but these should be retroactively added to my account in the new year once the LH flight activity posts. As marvelous as this sounds, I hold doubts that it will happen quite so effortlessly as the agent suggested.

My preference is to live as easy a life as possible so if pushed, I have no aversion to purchasing a nominal amount of miles and chucking some cash in UAL's direction to tide the account over for a further 18 months. Of course, the LH flights alone should have sufficiently done the trick but there we go, we do not live in a perfect world.

So, what do our experts here think? Wait it out or top up now?