How to keep your Avianca LifeMiles alive

Avianca LifeMiles can be a very useful frequent flyer program, but it has one big Achilles heel: miles expire after 12 months…and spending miles does not reset the clock.

Other issues include their poor website search tool, mandatory phone booking fees, and notoriously poor customer service. But in this post, we’ll concentrate on how to keep that pesky 12-month clock from biting into your LifeMiles stash.

There are a number of reasons to like the LifeMiles program:

• Avianca is a member of the Star Alliance. Since this is the largest airline alliance, it means that miles can be used for award flights on a huge number of airlines.
• Like United, Avianca does not pass along fuel surcharges to their members.
• Unlike United, Avianca doesn’t charge a close-in booking fee (United charges up to $75 per ticket when booking within 21 days)
• Avianca’s mixed-cabin award pricing makes it possible to get amazing deals (see this post for details).
• You don’t have to always have enough miles: Avianca often sell miles cheaply, plus they allow cash + miles for all award bookings.

LifeMiles Expiration Policy

• Miles expire after 12 months.
• You can reset the clock to extend the life of your miles by earning more miles.
• Spending miles no longer resets the clock.
• You can extend the expiration by earning miles from an Avianca branded credit card

How to Keep LifeMiles Alive

1. Fly a Star Alliance carrier (United, for example) and credit the flight to Avianca in order to earn miles.
2. Sign up for an Avianca credit card.
3. Transfer points from a transferable points currency or hotel program to Avianca.
4. Buy miles from Avianca. You can do this automatically and at a good rate through a LifeMiles subscription (details here).

Transfer points to keep points alive

The easiest way to extend the life of your LifeMiles is to transfer points from Citi ThankYou points (if you have the Citi ThankYou Premier or Citi ThankYou Prestige card), or from SPG (Starting August 2018, you can transfer from the combined Marriott SPG program at a rate of 3,000 points to 1,000 LifeMiles).

I tested to make sure that transferring points into LifeMiles actually resets the clock.  It does.

I transferred the minimum 1,000 points from Citi to LifeMiles.  The transfer completed instantly.  And as soon as I logged into my account again I saw that my point expiration date was reset:

Before transferring points my miles were set to expire in January 2019:

After transferring points (which I did in May 2018), my miles were set to expire in May 2019:

Of course I would have been better off waiting until December 2018 to transfer points to miles, but I wanted to confirm that this works before publishing these recommendations.

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