How to keep ff miles not expire?
 

When you have misc. miles on airlines you have not used in the last three years, but you may use in the future or you may wish to transfer at a future date, most airlines have a policy of wiping them out.
How do you protect against this outside of flying?
we were told that changing the address or phone number was considered by some airlines as "activity".

How to avoid expiration of miles
 

Sign up for Idine on your card and eat one meal in an Idine restaurant.
Order something from the shopping mart for that particular airline. :D

Send your sweetheart flowers, you'll get "bonus" points. :D

Donate a some miles to the relief effort in the Gulf states.

Starwood
 

Get a starwood Card and move a mile or two to your program.

Shop online through the airline / hotel portals, donate points to hurricane katrina relief, get a credit or debit card from the airline, redeem other loyalty points for miles, buy a minimum amount of miles from the airline or through miles4sale etc etc etc

See: http://www.andrewcram.com/frequentflyer.html for reference tables that cover most of these options.

Can you really move as little as one mile? I take it that's from the card, and not regular Starpoints.

I tried to look up whether one can transfer a single Starpoint, but the www.spg.com website is down right now.

Diners Club also works well at keeping accounts alive, albeit in 1000 mile increments.

Only SPG Platinum members can transfer 1 point. For Golds, the minimum is 1500 & for basic members, 2500.

Also, all points earned on the SPG card are regular *points.

Stay at one of their partner hotels or rent one of their partner car rentals, and chose their "bonus" miles.

Shop through their mileage mall and get something inexpensive. An example is buy at Circuit City a package of batteries. With in-store pickup, there will be no shipping charge. So for $3, you may get 9 bonus miles - which will keep your account active for another 3 years! (All 10,000 or 150,000 miles!)

Or any Amex card should do the trick!!

"Account activity" for this purpose generally means anything that affects your mileage balance, up or down, by any amount. Things like address changes are generally not "activity." While each airline writes its own rules and can define activity any way it wants to, it would be too easy for people to extend the lifetime of their miles indefinitely if all they had to do was create a minor variation of their address every 35 months or so.

Several suggestions for ways to earn miles have been made in previous posts. Check your airline's Web site or the link posted by ANDREWCX for its list of partners. Some of the suggestions made above work for many airlines but not all of them, and the OP didn't say which airline(s) s/he is interested in.

That's not a bad idea at all. ^

I have used IDine the most in this way since it could have a $5 meal and it will count, and you can easily change your credit card back and then back again to your favorite airline - if you don't have enough different credit cards to go around.

I like the AA kelloggs promotion, Delta Coke a Cola, AA Dannon water, and various games and puzzles that the programs come out with occasionally. They only give you a few hundred miles but they are cheap or free to participate in. Check Pgary's web site or the airline for current promotions.

Many rental cars will give you 50 miles.

Another thought - check your airline's definition of "three years." With AA, it's 36 months to the day after the last activity. With DL, it's December 31 after that, giving a little extra time to extend their life with something you might have done anyway. (Just found out about this yesterday when I saw that a recent AF flight extended my DL miles to December 31, 2008. I don't fly DL enough to have regular activity there, but I have a large enough balance with them to care about not losing it.)

Not at all, if the programs you need "any activity" in include American, British Airways, Frontier, Northwest, or United, among others! (Of the SIX FF programs I belong to, only Southwest is supported by MR AMEXs!)

That's why hotel-point-earnings Amex's like SPG (which does support all those airlines, except not Southwest, but Southwest doesn't have "miles" and what expiration it does have requires much more than "any activity") or Hilton HHonors are the only Amexs you can use for the above airlines.

Excellent suggestions if you want to spend the minimum money/points, but a couple qualifiers:

1. iDine won't let you remove the LAST card from one program temporarily to sign up for another one. So you really need as many cards as you have airline FF programs you're trying to keep from expiring, to be able to use this for a bunch of FF programs.

2. Airlines' shopping mart miles are the slowest miles of any kind to post (they can take many months), because for one thing the merchants wait a couple months to make sure you're not going to return the item before they even START the process of reporting the miles (and then the process can be slow because it may not be "all electronic" by any means). So this is not a solution to use anywhere near the last minute. It is a good solution, tho, if you use it regularly (say, once a year) for an ONGOING plan to defer expiration of miles.

As long as the location does not have a minimum, you can purchase any amount - and it will count as "an activity".

I visit a restaurant that also has a take out window. My usual purchase is a $1.50 soda! That will be enough to extend the account's life.

Thank you ladies and gentlemen. Terrific ideas!

People have reported in other threads that mistakenly-"expired" miles were reinstated on the basis of activity in the necessary time frame, even if its miles didn't post until after it ended. You may have to call the airline but it shouldn't be a problem.

Two months ago, you asked that same question here, and were told that this was generally incorrect.

Mike

Just did this ... thanks ...
 

I have some 200,000+ miles on one program that are due to expire in 90 days; I haven't flown that airline in the last 3 years because I've already hit 1MM miles with them and am working on my first MM on another.

I signed up on iDine for this first FF program on a Wednesday, picked a restaurant from the list and had dinner with Mrs. Oldandslow on Friday, and the miles (and "last activity date" update) posted the next weekend. Now no worries for three more years, and yes, I do intend to use the miles "sometime" - I just haven't had much time for pleasure trips.

I had also made a small purchase at one of the mall shops, received the goods, paid the credit card bill, and STILL haven't received the miles. Don't count on this option if you need the mile credit anytime soon.

Oldandslow

It all depends on the merchant. I've had my miles post from some merchants very quickly, but some others were very slow to post.

Remember that secondary cards for AMEX have different numbers and can be used to hold a slot in a FF program - or cards you don't really use, or use for a loan, or a debit card. That keeps it open so that you could cancel a card from one FF to another for the sake of keeping the second one alive. You can then cancel and transfer it back.