Alaska Airlines has eliminated miles expiration. Accounts used to go inactive (therefore expiring miles) after 24 months without earning or redeeming their points. Now accounts go inactive but can be reactivated with all of your points restored for free – as long as you do it within a year. I missed this last wrinkle when first looking at the change, and it means account expiration in 3 years of true inactivity.
Do my miles expire?
Mileage Plan miles do not expire
If miles don’t expire, does that mean my account will remain active indefinitely?
For account security purposes, we will continue to lock accounts that have been inactive for more than 2 years. If your account has been locked due to inactivity, call Guest Care to verify your identity, and they’ll reactivate the account for you. All miles in the account will still be there for you to use.
Alaska – which famously did not pause mileage expiration for the first two years of the pandemic – joins Delta, JetBlue, United and Southwest in no longer expiring miles. American Airlines remains an outlier, with miles expiring after 24 months of inactivity for members 21 years old or older. However, according to the Mileage Plan program terms, miles sort of do expire – because if you don’t reactive your account within a year (for free) they may not be willing to re-active your account at all.
If a deactivated Mileage Plan account is not reactivated within 1 year after deactivation (3 years after your last qualifying activity), it may not be reactivated in the future, and all Mileage Plan miles previously associated with that account will be forfeited.
When miles expire, airlines remove liability from their books and recognize revenue. Eliminating expiration of miles imposes a cost on the program. Engaged members may prefer a regime where miles expire – if a program is willing to invest a certain amount in members they’d rather the investments be with them than occasional members.
Increasingly expiration of miles makes little sense for programs that want to interact with infrequent transactors, relying less on heavy flyers who also spend on a co-brand and purchase through a shopping portal. Expiring miles is a way to cut ties with infrequent customers, so the move – following most other U.S. carriers – is unsurprising.
Once you make it worth only 1 c each and increase cost to the stratisphere expiration makes little sense – how is the average joe going to get 1M mimles for the next teip to Vegas?
Alaska with its clever scheme is not going to increase loyalty
typo
Stratosphere
Baby steps towards a No Expiry policy.
Another curiousity of AlaskaMP is how they decide who gets the maximum bonus during mileage sales. For instance, my mileage balance has dropped to zero this year due to active redemptions, but still get offers of 35% bonus miles (where 60% is offered to some). This is curious since I am ineligible as I have maxxed out on the number of miles I can buy for 2022. I guess 35% of nothing is pretty much the same as 60% of nothing! haha.
Facinated to see what the first sale of 2023 throws up!
Other than Int partner value on redemption
(Hear its going to get much worse with their next devaluation )
Alaska has really fallen from where it once was.During the he pandemic they were terrible to deal with using gold guest upgrades especially comes to mind.I let mine expire
Its become a mini delta when it comes to domestic redemption
Over the past months the 12 500 coach redemption one way ticket is running 30 to 50 k
A deal is 20,000 miles burn baby burn and run
Agents are clueless how to book one world partner awards sometimes even if seats are there
saying its phantom inventory which wasn’t the case at the time
It gets so bad I just pay more miles and book through American
The food in first class which I pay for is vile except for dessert
Before the pandemic it was really getting better
You mean “24 months”…
“ Accounts used to go inactive (therefore expiring miles) after 24 miles”
It sounds like your miles will never expire as long as you keep calling to unlock your account.
If you don’t earn or burn miles or call to unlock your account I’d say the miles weren’t worth much to you anyway.
You didn’t explain now you activate account in the year of inactive status?
@MrWheat
Form the original article: “If your account has been locked due to inactivity, call Guest Care to verify your identity, and they’ll reactivate the account for you.”
That seems self-explanitory.
If I cancel the Credit Card from Alaska Airlines will my miles get clawed back?