My CO miles did not expire without any type of activation.

CO is a bit like BMI. Your miles may expire if your account is inactive, but the small print is enforced at random.

Microsofts club bing will close shop at the end of May 2012. If you were planning to trade your points for miles, tough luck. The miles awards (Delta, Alaska, ...) were removed from the club bing prize mall without notice.

A specific case for all you disloyal flyers:
My FIL is flying out here in June. He seriously never flies, except once every few years to see us. Doesn't understand the first thing about FF miles- wanted us to book the tickets "so we could get the miles." (I booked the tickets anyway, without explaining, so that I could be sure he got the best flights possible...)

Because of flight times, the main leg of his flight is on United (about 2,000 miles one way) and the second (500 miles one way) leg is on American.

Trying to decide where to stash the miles. Haven't found a reasonable program that works for both (not really interested in opening up a Jet Airways account).

Goal would be to get something useful out of the miles (trip, hotel stay, etc) in the long term without too much maintenance (because I will be doing the maintaining). Any creative thoughts, aside from just stashing at United & American and trying to keep them alive over time?

If you're in a country that allows BMI Diamond Club accounts, use it for the United flight. If you can't sign up with BMI you might as well keep your miles with United, because most of the Star Alliance programs have synced their small print by now.

For the AA part I'd use Alaska or British Airways.

Keeping your miles alive is as simple as buying something for one dollar at eBay or B&N every two years (1.5 years for United).


edit: BA bought BMI, so if you collect the miles for both flights with them you can probably merge the accounts later on.

How do you do that?

BTW glad I read this thread, didn't realize that LH miles expire in 3 years.

Go to airline website, log into ff account, click their link to one of their shopping partners, and buy something you'd have bought anyway.

A two dollar USB gadget from ebay or amazon gets you a handful of miles which count as account activity to reset the expiration time bomb.

Here's what it looks like for BMI:
http://www.flybmi.com/bmi/en-gb/loya...-shopping.aspx

News from BMI. First Lufthansa, now BA, I wonder when Air France will buy them.

I don't know if this will make their program better or if it's gonna be the end of a hidden gem among the *A programs.

use topguest and link to mileageplus and then check-in at airports to get 50 miles, keeps untied from expiring.

BMI Diamond Club as we know it is about to end:

More on the destruction of Diamond Club:

Starting 31 May 2012 you can no longer earn or redeem miles on any Star Alliance flight. BMI will eventually join OneWorld, but this will take a while. During the transition BMI is effectively not part of any alliance.

Unfortunately that means that there won't be a single european *A airline left that's suitable for the disloyal. The Lufthansa group just doesn't cut it.

United seems to be the best option for disloyal *A refugees.

miles.site666.info updated:

BA, BMI, Iberia

You can move miles between BMI, Iberia, and BA in any direction you like, but moved miles cannot be moved again.

BA will match your BMI status if you ask them.


KLM, Air France

No more fuel surcharge for flights within Europe, North Africa, and Israel.
[edit: only if you pay for your tickets with miles]

You can pay excess bagage fees with miles.

I'd add Norwegian's CashPoints programme to this list. Upside is you can very easily redeem cashpoints on the next flight, for example, and get a small discount. The downside is that points expire after 2-3 years.

More info here: http://www.norwegian.com/uk/norwegia...ianreward/faq/

Negative for JetBlue (True Blue) for non-frequent travelers: you need to fly with them at least once a year or you lose the miles.
I had 6k miles expiring recently so I just booked a flight 10 months from now. Hopefully I can take advantage of it :) .

This list is so packed cram full of expired and outdated information that I fail to see the point of not closing the thread. Mods? Can't speak to the other information but the Delta information from 2010 has no relevance to life in our decade, and I suspect the same is true of much of the rest of the thread. Why can't we close this and if there is anything useful remaining out there for infrequent flyers, open a thread that at least is in the same decade that we plan to fly. Thanks for considering this request.