Air Miles: Use them or lose them

Judging by the online comments greeting Air Miles’ announcement on reward miles that you either “use them or lose them”, people are not happy by this development.

Posted on the Air Miles website: “Starting Dec. 31st, all Air Miles reward miles in your account will have a date stamp of five years. This means that any reward miles that have been earned before December 31, 2011 will need to be redeemed by December 31, 2016. Reward miles you earn after Dec. 31, 2011 will need to be redeemed five years from when they were posted.”

Forget the fact that it took me 11 years of collecting before I used my reward miles for my first flight (to Edmonton), what really bothered me about this expiry date is that it’s not front and centre on their website when I checked it on Dec. 30th. Instead, I had to click on the “Learn about AIR MILES® Cash and important changes to our program” to read the policy announcement. The part where you lose your points after five years isn’t mentioned until the bottom of the announcement.

Participants aren’t told why there’s a change to the policy, only that we should check out the changes to the “Terms and Conditions regarding the expiry of reward miles.”

No reason is given for this expiry date beyond the honest statement: “We want Collectors to use their reward miles and are developing additional ways to make it even easier to redeem.”

As Neil Everett, chief marketing officer for Air Miles told the Huffington Post, part of the company's reason for the new policy is for the company’s benefit, not consumers: "We are a publicly traded company, and publicly traded companies have come under a lot of scrutiny," he said. "We need a better ability to to forecast redemption."

With 14 million active Air Miles cards in Canada, according to Everett, I’m betting that there will be fewer, once Collectors cash in their rewards and start scoping reward plans that better suit their situations.

Contact Peggy Mackenzie at pmackenzie@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @PeggyMackenzie

Read also: Why did 'free' Air Miles plane tickets cost $1,900?