Dear airlines: It's time to get rid of mileage expiration, for good

23.08.2023 - 21:19 / thepointsguy.com / Nick Ewen

Alaska Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Hawaiian Airlines, JetBlue, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines have all realized mileage expiration policies hurt their bottom lines — which is why they've done away with these antiquated policies. While change fees were a casualty of the pandemic (mostly), some airlines still aggravatingly expire customers' miles.

Let's face it: Airline loyalty programs are huge money-makers. Some airline loyalty programs have higher monetary valuations than the airlines themselves. And by expiring customers' miles, TPG believes they're ostracizing the core of their business.

Here's why all airlines should eliminate mileage expiration policies — for good.

Before diving into why mileage expiration policies shouldn't exist, let's review how your miles can expire. In most programs, your miles can expire due to a lack of activity, but this can happen in two different ways.

The first type of policy expires miles after a certain period, but they also allow you to extend their validity with qualifying activities. Here's a list of programs that use this approach:

For these airlines, you can often extend the validity of your miles by crediting a paid flight to the program, earning miles through a partner or even redeeming miles for a future ticket. You may even be able to transfer credit card rewards to reset the expiration clock (though this doesn't extend to Flying Blue miles).

Here's another option: shopping on your loyalty program's shopping portal. When you earn miles, that should extend the expiration in most cases.

Refer to this post to learn more about extending points and miles.

Unfortunately, many airlines follow the second (and more restrictive) type of expiration policy.

The "use them or lose them" approach is the most restrictive of the mileage expiration policies, perhaps even cruel. These programs require you to redeem your miles within a certain period from earning them. There's no easy way to extend them.

Several TPG staffers have ended up with stranded Singapore Airlines miles from credit card transfers on flights that were later canceled. Recently, TPG director of content Nick Ewen transferred expiring Singapore Airlines miles to Marriott Bonvoy. Even though this option provides an underwhelming 2:1 transfer ratio, it was a way to find some value from miles that would have otherwise expired.

Now, it's worth noting that you can pay to extend Singapore miles ($12 or 1,200 miles for every 10,000 miles), but this is a one-time option. Additionally, it only adds six months for nonelite members — and only 12 months for KrisFlyer Silver and Gold elites.

Now, let's discuss why airlines should remove these policies once and for all.

Related: How to get your points and miles