Questions and Answers

I had about 120K miles with United, but hadn’t flown them in close to two years. I logged on to book a flight, and saw that my account was down to 20K miles. I called and they told me that since I hadn’t flown them in 18 months, 100K miles expired from my account. I told them that was ridiculous — they never contacted me about this, and I’ve been flying for 25 years and never had this happen. They said “too bad”, there’s nothing they could do about it. I pushed back — of course there is…they award miles all the time to folks. They again said “too bad”. Is there anything I can do here?

Well their policy is that miles expire after 18 months of inactivity so I’m not sure what you could do now except maybe ask what a reinstatement fee would be.

Many mileage programs have some sort of mileage expiration policy with varying methods of extending the expiration date. [URL]https://onemileatatime.com/keep-miles-from-expiring/[/URL]

You could look up the list of UAL contacts on Elliott and try to reach out to see if they can do anything for you. The key part here is that you forgot to keep track of your miles, not that UA screwed you over, no matter how frustrated you are right now.

For the future, it might also consider a tool like awardwallet that updates you on your mileage balances and expiring miles. Good luck!