craigthemif

I respect your opinion @1flyer about aiming for best practice on password management, but you managed to scare off a FT member who had just had points expire and CLEARLY isn't going to run a manual Excel spreadsheet because she has better things to do with her time. And you seem to hold AW to a much much higher standard than virtually every single airline and hotel chain frequent flyer programme, which receive brute force attacks almost daily I'd imagine.

There is best practice, and there is good-enough, especially for people who don't want to obsess about their miles balances. A really strong password for AW is good enough for almost everybody. Most people are far more likely to be hacked by using their phone or computer on airport or hotel wifi.

It also gets boring to read about made-up conflicts of interest. AW don't pay bloggers - at best they let us hand out upgrade vouchers once in awhile. I'm sure @Raffles would say this himself, but we rarely, if ever, recommend something we don't use ourselves. So feel free to opine that we're naive about password management, but conflict of interest is simply incorrect.

1flyer

And that drives traffic to the blog which increases your revenue from ads and referrals. And we all know AW would stop giving you dozens of upgrade vouchers at a time if you wrote that they suck. I call that a conflict of interest.

FlyerTalker688786

I actually agree with you. I think Flyertalk should have some sort of mechanism here to stop bloggers giving favourable arguments to a particular vendor if the blogger has commercial interest with that particular vendor.

demue

At least with Award Wallet one can enable 2FA and in addition to the password require a code to be entered every time the account is accessed. I wish IHG and other airline or hotel FFPs were even close to that. YMMV, for me the benefits of AW easily outweigh potential concerns.

JBTX

I just had a similar issue as OP. Somebody directed to me to this forum which had some links on the subject. I appreciated the link.

The flip side of this is many people may diligently support a vendor, and then have their points taken away by the vendor's internal rules. Sure, the rules are available, and "should" be known. But people are people, and "stuff" happens. The fact that they had no activity in 12 months does not take away from the customer history and prior loyalty.

As to other hotel chains, a similar thing happened to me at Marriot about a year ago, and they restored the points no questions asked.

Yes, the fact that the points expire is my fault. There are reasons that contributed to it, but it is what it is. The question is now how will the company respond to its customers. What is more important, its internal rules or customer service? Assuming it isn't resolved, I will avoid IHG at all costs going forward, which is bad business for them, as I surely will be traveling in the future and would have used them again.

Fitzherbert Carruthers

I too am fast losing any loyalty to IHG over the events of the last week. Spent seven nights in Fiji recently. At the time of booking the app showed estimated points for the stay being approximately 31000. This is without any food and beverage spending. When I get back home my statement shows 26541 points earned.

Secondly, had to spend a night in Sydney on the way back. Booked Intercontinental Sydney on a non refundable rate. The app allowed me to buy extra 1000 points for AUD5, 2000 points for AUD10 and 4000 points for AUD15. Took the option to buy extra 4000 points. The confirmation email shows estimated points for that stay as being 9167 points. For this trip, my statement shows ZERO points earned. They have charged me for the extra 4000 points and given me zero points for the whole stay.

Normally when this type of thing happens, I jump on Twitter @IHG Service and get it sorted out. There is normally a lady called Pam who is very helpful. This time around I have been dealing with other staff (please come back Pam). Explained the situation to them and they have not been any help at all. For the Sydney stay, they have said that the app was wrong. Nothing further.

So far this year I have spent 26 nights at IHG properties and have a further 30 nights booked from now to the end of February. This experience is making me consider cancelling the upcoming nights and spending them at Hilton or Marriott properties.

thunderlounge

If your points are short, check the currency conversion.

Fitzherbert Carruthers

Thanks. The FJD has not devalued by over 12% in the time between booking and payment. Also no F&B spending taken into account.

chrism20

1flyer

I hear Marriott's loyalty program is running super-smoothly as of right now

NickB

...and quite rightly so, I would have thought. If one of your frequent flyer/stayer account is compromised, then (1) it is just that account which is compromised so that the damage is not widespread and (2) one can reasonably expect the airline or hotel chain concerned to make good the damage caused.
The problem if your AW is compromised is that (1) all your FFP/FSP programmes will be compromised, leading to potentially much more widespread damage and (2) I am very far from sure that AW would willingly agree to compensate you for the damage caused should the proverbial hit the fan and I can't see the airline or hotel chains doing so either when the security hole is exterior to them.

Not that it means that AW should not be used but it is right that higher standards of security should be used with a service aggregating access to multiple accounts.

Crofton138

Have you submitted a missing points request, which you'll find when you login to your account?

I'd reconsider switching to Marriott if you've got an issue with tracking down missing points. Marriott are currently absolutely dreadful.