Oops, My Miles Expired! Creative Thinking and Persistence Pays Off

Imagine getting an email from AwardWallet with this in it… ,

when you know for certain that you hadn’t booked an award with KLM or used your miles in any way.

‘Uh oh…’ was the first thing that went though my head and I immediately started trying to figure out what had happened. My first two thoughts were that the miles expired or been redeemed fraudulently. I immediately logged into my KLM account and confirmed that the miles had expired, but after looking through my activity I needed to confirm the expiration policy of KLM/Air France Flying Blue. The Flying Blue mileage expiration policy is that a qualifying flight must have posted to your account within the past 20 months to keep your miles active. Redeeming miles doesn’t renew the life of your miles, which is what had caught me.

I contacted Flying Blue via phone to see if I could get my miles reinstated for a fee, but they informed me that that was not something that they do. After finding that out, I briefly thought I was out of luck. I looked back through paid SkyTeam flights I had taken this year and credited to Delta (or Alaska in the case of Delta metal) to see if there was anything that would be worth trying to get removed from my Delta account. I called up Delta, and since all of my paid flights had been in April, they were not willing and/or able to remove the activity from my account. Once again I thought I was out of luck.

Finally, I came up with one last idea. I had taken an Aeroflot flight in April as well and credited it to Delta, but the fare class had not earned any miles with Delta. Even though the flight was showing in my Delta activity and I wasn’t certain what fare class I had been booked in, I figured sending the information along to Flying Blue was worth a shot. It turns out that the ticket was booked into ‘R’ class, which earns 25% miles with Flying Blue. SUCCESS! I earned 125 miles from that $80 ticket from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and that saved me 25,000 miles that would have otherwise expired. Flying Blue automatically reinstated my miles when they credited the flight.

What a win for the week.