Expiration of miles

If you haven't been paying any attention to this you've probably lost lots of frequent flier miles.

Most FF programs expire the miles in your account after a certain amount of inactivity. I lost about 10K in my Delta account in 2000 by miscalculating time since my last flight. My parents had 25K in their United accounts till a few months ago when they hit the (new and shorter) 18 months since last activity date.

Imagine my surprise when I resurrected access to my Continental OnePass account which I haven't used in over fifteen years (I've been flying CO but crediting the miles to my Delta SkyTeam account) and found that it had over five thousand miles in it?

Turns out, Continental miles never expire. I have heard their FF program referred to as NoPass so maybe they don't do you any good if you can't use them... I haven't had any trouble using UA miles when I've wanted/needed to, and AA has been reasonably good on that front as well...

Now it doesn't take much to keep the miles from expiring. Just spend or earn a couple of miles. Any activity on the account will reset the expiration - link your Safeway card to your account and spend enough to earn 100 miles, or use one of those earn-miles-for-clicking-here websites, or buy some flowers using a link on the airline site, transfer or convert some miles/points, etc.

But you've got to remember to do it. That's why keeping only three or four FF accounts is best - combine all travel on the same alliance into the same FF account (I use AA for OneWorld, UA for StarAlliance, DL for SkyTeam and then I've got JetBlue and VirginAmerica who aren't part of any alliance yet).