Remember the last time you woke up in cold sweat fearing that your miles expired? So here's another item for the wish-list: A service that guarantees that your miles never expire by depositing a few miles just before expiration date...

That would be a good idea. I just once a year move a couple miles from my Starwood account to each of my dormant mileage accounts.

How much would you pay for such a service? Maybe I should start one up

One thing that I've done recently is donate a small amount of miles from each account. CO has it so you can donate a small amount (I've done as few as 5 miles) to a large number of charities.

MileageManager will automatically notify you if your miles are about to expire. Also, I believe Randy said once that an upcoming feature actually will do what the OP wants: deposit a few miles to keep the account active. I'm not positive about this, though, so perhaps Randy can chime in.

$9.99/year for 1 account, $14.99 for 3, $19.99 for 10?

Given that you only need 1 mile to extend the expiration date of an account, this seems like a nice markup for the service operator...

I was wondering about this too... It's sometimes hard for me keep track of which account has expiring miles since I have a few frequent flyer accounts...

But services to keep track already exist. (But you have to be willing to pay for them, or else do the work yourself.)

All that doesn't exist yet is a way to have the service (rather than you manually) do something to extend the expiration (where it can be extended).

Note that not all programs allow you to extend miles/credits/whatever (in particular, many of the LCCs don't). In those, you have to get through a threshold by the "drop dead" date or it all goes poof.

Not sure how the "mileage deposit" could possibly help you with programs like Starwood and Amtrak which require actual stays (or an SPG Amex) or train trips to extend the life of your account. I'm sure there are others that have similar requirements.

Slightly OT, but related anecdote: just for the heck of it, I used points.com to exchange 30 USAirways miles for 1 Delta mile -- for no other reason than to extend the life of my Delta miles (the addition of the 1 mile extended the expiration from Dec. 31, 2006 to Dec. 31, 2008).

I really have no burning need for either USAir or Delta miles, and have tiny, tiny balances in each program, so the points swap was more just "because I can." I was actually quite surprised that points.com let me swap such a small number of miles/points; with most programs that participate in points.com, the minimum swap is something like 2,000 or 5,000 or whatever. @:-) However, for swaps out of USAir, the minimum is just whatever amount produces 1 mile or point in the destination program; in this particular case, only 30 miles.

Anyhow, it was an easy way to extend the expiration. Even easier than registering one of my credit cards for Delta/idine (Rewards Network) and then using that card at an idine-participating restaurant!

Kathy, thanks for the tip. I had a few hundred US Air miles about to expire, so I swapped them into another program. Lousy rate of exchange, but I was losing them anyway. Points.com has changed so much through the years that I didn't know we could do swaps like this now.

More and more North American airlines are changing their mile expiration policy. US, DL and CO are already in the 18-24 months range, and Air Canada announced today a 1 year expiration policy. Also, AC miles will have a 7-year expiration date. More information here: http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2006/1...leschange.html

You're welcome!

And I've also used points.com to transfer "orphaned" miles (tiny balances in programs I never use) into other programs that I do use. As you say, lousy rate of exchange, but I'd rather have, for example, 200 miles in a program that has 50K+ usable miles rather than 2,000 miles all by its lonesome with an airline that I never fly on.

The expiration date extension was just a side benefit.

I've got about 9000 Delta miles. Not enough for anything. Know how I can exchange these? Would really like to get them to AA or Continental.

Off the top of my head, I don't know.

As you probably realize, points.com does NOT allow swaps FROM Delta Skymiles; they only allow swaps INTO that program.

Does Delta offer any merchandise or magazines for small amounts of miles? (Think, holiday gifts for someone....)