Cathay Pacific’s Asia Miles used to have an awful expiration policy — miles earned before January 1, 2020 expire(d) after 36 months regardless of activity. Cathay announced a change in that policy back at the end of 2019, so miles earned from January 1, 2020 won’t expire if you have activity every 18 months. Unfortunately, the policy did not extend to miles earned before 1/1/20 — those miles still expire after 36 months. Given COVID, that’s been awful for people who had miles earned prior to 1/1/20. But there is good news: Points Adventure points out that it is possible to get your old miles extended / converted to the new expiration policy by transferring in 3,000 miles total from two external programs. It’s a quirky system, but it should be relatively easy for most readers.
The disconcerting thing about the process is that you must first let your miles expire and then transfer from external programs. However, Points Adventure notes that you can confirm the process with Cathay Pacific prior to expiration. I don’t know why they don’t just make this easier and allow the old miles to convert to the new system prior to expiration, but I assume there is a technical limitation at play. Points Adventure confirms that the process only took about 36 hours from start to finish, so you will likely only need to do a minor amount of hand-wringing waiting for the miles to be reactivated.
Those with old miles set to expire in the near future should definitely check out the Points Adventure post and get the ball rolling with Asia Miles before the miles expire.
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My miles expired today (9/30/21), and I tried for the second time via Asia Miles chat support. My first time (earlier this week) did not work. They would not budge and only responded with pre-set responses (“sorry… you can redeem the miles instead… etc… etc…”). Requested a special arrangement. Got no help at all!
But this time, they immediately responded with this:
“Under the impact of COVID-19, many countries and regions implied travel restrictions. We understand that the opportunity for you to redeem tickets is significantly affected.
Due to the current situation, we are able to offer a special arrangement for you to renew your #### miles, which was expired on 30SEP2021.
The #### miles will be restored to your account later. Once restored, those miles will be valid until 30APR2023 (activity-based) and will be auto-renewed if there is any earn or redeem transaction in your account, please check your Asiamiles balance around 2 weeks later. Thank you.”
Not sure if this is a new policy or just a lucky exception…. but try it anyway!
Awesome, thanks for reporting this!
Last week I first contacted Asia Miles via email asking if this was a valid way to restore my expired miles. I received a response saying it was and that I needed to reply back confirming that I wanted to proceed. They responded back and said I need to have 3000 points in activity within 90 days. Activity can be flying, shopping, or transfer of miles from 2 sources. Today I transferred 3000 points total from Amex and Citi. A few hours later my expired points are restored.
Nope, this did not work for me. AsiaMiles responded that that don’t do that. I had about 60k that expired at the end of 2020. Oh well, that’s okay. I don’t plan on using CX anymore for personal reasons.
Did you contact them via email? Not sure who you spoke to but it does work.
I used twitter. What’s the email address? Is there also a template that we could use?
Ok, I’ve found the email address. I will give it a shot via email to AsiaMiles. Thanks Drew for your reply!
How did it turn out? Their email address is memberservices@asiamiles.com.
Thanks @Drew for asking! Yes, I just received a reply from Asia Miles that I need to transfer 3k miles activity from two sources. It looks like the only way to get this done is via the email that you have. I just transferred 3k of my pts from MR and TY pts. Really thanks for asking and caring! First person to do that.
“The trick for extending your old Cathay Pacific miles”
OK, but it’s not a trick; it’s just their policy in extending the miles. I’m surprised it took bloggers this long to report on this. There’s been a thread in Flyertalk’s Cathay Pacific sub-forum for several months now. Just saying…