Patrick Sojka, who produces the Rewards Canada blog, recently wrote in the Toronto Star (5 things loyalty card companies don't want you to know) that loyalty programs count on a certain proportion of points and miles going unclaimed. It's money in their pockets instead of yours. One way they have of ensuring this is by setting a date when points will expire.
Some hotel and most airline frequent flier plans have points expiry dates: if you have no activity in your account during a certain period of time, the points disappear. (Delta Airlines SkyMiles is an exception: points never expire.) That's why a points tracking service like AwardWallet, which tells you when your points will expire, is very useful. And it's also why you should learn how to earn miles in your plans without having to fly, such as through hotel stays, point swapping, and online shopping, searches, and surveys.
While points in most plans expire after 18 or 24 months of inactivity, Aeroplan is unusually harsh in snatching back your points after only 12 months. And Aeroplan is unique (to my knowledge) in adopting a policy, a few years back, of erasing points seven years after they've been earned, even if you're earning points every single day.
Imagine if you contributed to your savings account each week and your bank simply decreed it was going to take any money that had been in there for more than seven years.
And they call this a loyalty program?
Anyhoo, Aeroplan has taken a lot of flak over its policy, and deservedly so, but at least it is now notifying its members of the pending confiscation of their points. And I should stress, that no one has lost any points yet: the policy set the earned date of all previously held points as December 31, 2006. That means that Aeroplan won't take away points earned before then until December 21, 2013.
So you still have two years to redeem any points earned before 2007. And if you have redeemed points since 2007, you may have redeemed those at-risk points already.
How can you find out if your Aeroplan points are safe? Like me, you may have received an email recently with a statement of the points that will expire in 2013 and 2014. If not, you can check the status of your points by going to aeroplan.com, clicking on Your Account, Account Expiry Status, and Request Mileage Status.
When Aeroplan was simply the frequent flier program of Air Canada, maybe a seven year point expiration policy wasn't a big deal. Regular Air Canada customers earned miles from flying, hotel stays and car rentals, and were expected to "earn and burn".
But today Aeroplan is an independent loyalty program company: most members earn points mainly from affiliated credit card spending, and/or gas (Esso) and grocery (Sobeys) purchases. And since a pair of economy class seats to Europe requires at least 120,000 points and Australia 280,000, that dream vacation may require a decade of patiently accumulating one mile at a time. In other words, it's an impossibility for many members if their points are snatched back from them after seven years.
Simply put, Aeroplan's seven-year expiration policy is an abuse of its members' loyalty and a theft of their property.
Follow me on Twitter: @AeneasLane
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