BREAKING: Air Miles Will NOT Expire!
Recently, Air Miles, a popular shopping rewards program in Canada, announced that if miles aren’t used for five years, they’d expire. This was to come into effect on January 1, 2017. Canadians were in an uproar, as they’d be losing millions of miles.
CBC reporter Sophia Harris announced today that Air Miles will be cancelling their plan to introduce a points expiry policy, effective immediately. The article states:
“We have decided to cancel the expiry policy so that all collectors, regardless of location, can be confident that their balances will be protected,” Bryan Pearson, president and CEO of LoyaltyOne, said in a statement.
This is fabulous news for Canadians who were worried about their Air Miles. Personally, I don’t care about Air Miles because I think they offer little value, but I realize most Canadians collect Air Miles from shopping and from BMO/AMEX. I wonder if this kills the recent Ontario bill to ban rewards points expiry?
These companies (Air Miles, Aeroplan/Aimia, etc) cannot be trusted; I am not sure if the proposed legislation would have helped, but sure it gave them additional pressure on top of what the media gave them. Now, they can just keep devalue the points if they can’t take them off the balance sheet. As always, buyers beware.
So now they’ve pissed off those who redeemed their AMs because they expected them to expire at the end of this month! This does upset the whole accounting/business model of these programs, predicated on a “breakage” (or unused, expiring points/miles) to reduce overhanging liabilities. Air Miles/Loyalty Marketing and Aeroplan/Aimia will survive and still do well. It’s just their investor outlooks are somewhat diminished. Aimia’s stock price never recovered from walking back its expiry policy.