The other day I wrote about my unfortunate discovery that both my AAdvantage mileage accounts had zeroed out due to inactivity. I also wrote to AAdvantage customer service and received an interesting response which I’ll share for web searchers who might be looking for this information.
First, I received this email:
Because qualifying activity extends the expiration date of all active
miles in the account, there may be an easy way of restoring your expired
miles. If you had an eligible mileage-earning transaction prior to May
26, 2014 (the date the miles expired from your account) and no older
than 12 months, then let’s get that transaction credited. When these
miles are credited to your account, your expired miles will
automatically be restored on the same day! For more information on how
miles are earned, please visit us at www.aa.com/earn. You can also
request missing mileage credit from the ‘Request Air Mileage Credit’ or
the ‘Request Non-Air Mileage Credit’ links from this page.
If you did not have any qualifying activity, we have a couple of paid
alternatives. Let me know if you’re interested, and I’ll be pleased to
furnish details.
Hmm. Unless there’s some coded wink-wink message, the only way I’d restore my miles is if I had done some qualifying activity, it had not been recorded, and I’d failed to report it. Highly unlikely. So I inquired about the paid options and got this:
To get you involved again, we have designed a Re-engagement Challenge – a set of activities created to introduce you to the program and to restore all or part of your expired miles, based on your participation.
First, register for the Re-engagement Challenge with AAdvantage Customer Service and pay the $30 registration charge.
Once you’re registered, you have 6 months from your registration date to complete the requirements listed below:
1. Subscribe to the AAdvantage eSummary™ and AAdvantage Promotions email and remain opted-in to these two subscriptions for the duration of your Re-engagement Challenge
In conjunction with your registration, you are also subscribed to receive these email messages if you haven’t been receiving them already. These helpful subscriptions send you information on how you can earn more miles and provide a monthly summary of your activity and current mileage expiration date.
2. Complete the following mileage earning activity within six months of your registration to restore the desired amount of miles: (for under 50,000 points, which is my level)
Earn 5,000 partner base miles*
OR
Earn miles for 1 round trip flight**
In many markets, a round trip is available for a couple hundred dollars or less. So for a fairly small investment you could earn back as many as 50,000 miles, which are supposedly worth $900. Fair enough. American is also getting you back into the traces with the behavior they expect from an AAdvantage member.
In closing, you may recall I had two accounts–one which zeroed out a few days prior, and the other last October. I wrote customer service separately about each of them. The long-expired account received no response.
I hate to say it Otis, but your experience pales in comparison to that I recently had with my 401K vendor from a past employer as I attempted to learn how to make a rollover. It was like something out of Saturday Night Live! And using United as much as I do now, I will take American any day!
To be fair to your former employer, they probably had some legal mandatories they had to follow. Since American invented AAdvantage, they can do pretty much what they they want. They can ask me to stand on my head, if they wish, though they also could have made it easier for me and earned some goodwill.
Thank you good sir! I had read about this program elsewhere, but most of the references were from a year ago. Your page was the only one that came up in a “last month only” search as of, well, the day you posted this! Also, you were the only one who mentioned being able to get this through email, which is great for me because I have a bit of phone phobia. Just emailed them so don’t know what the response will be, but thanks to you I’m quite confident about the results. 🙂
Ah nevermind, I spoke too soon! For some reason I just got the auto-reply below. I used the same form to contact them and chose “Mileage Rention” as the subject; did you use something different?
“Because of the complexity of this topic and number of options available to you, we’ve found that we best solve these issues via conversation. We invite you to call us at 800-882-8880. We’re available Monday through Friday, 9:00-5:30 Central Time, when you speak ‘AAdvantage Account Services’ at the Main Menu. Any representative will be happy to assist you.”
Carl, I went through the customer service web form–see the previous post on this topic below. Good luck!
Carl (and others), here’s an update. You do indeed have to call to register for the “Re-engagement Challenge”. I found this info in the email, prior to the one that I quoted above that stated terms:
To that end, please contact AAdvantage Customer Service at 800-882-8880
(say ‘AAdvantage Account’ at the Main Menu), then ask about the
Re-engagement Challenge. We’re open Monday through Friday from 9:00-5:30
Central Time and any representative will be happy to assist you.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to respond. We look forward to
serving you in the future.
By the way, in the fine print of the subsequent email (the one I quoted above) it says this method can be used to activate miles which expired within the last 5 years. So I’ll be trying it for both my accounts.