Reinstating Expired American Airlines Miles

I screwed up. I let my wife’s AA miles expire due to inactivity in the account. The gist of it is that we didn’t have much use for them during the last two years of Covid, and they were forgotten about.

Allow me a quick minute to vent before I get to the reinstatement of the miles.

1. American Airlines allows miles to expire after 24 months of inactivity in the account. This was actually improved earlier this year from the previous policy of 18 months. Meanwhile, United, Delta, Southwest, and Jetblue miles have no expiration date. An expiration date only exists to limit the number of miles floating around, thereby reducing the potential cost to the airline. It’s annoying, and not customer-friendly. I especially hate that AA didn’t allow for any one-time extensions due to Covid.
2. Last year, AA also forced popular miles/points tracking website Award Wallet to stop tracking AAdvantage accounts. Another customer-unfriendly move that simply serves to eliminate the number of miles floating around.

So if people can’t track when their miles expire, and if they expire after a set period of time, then AA can significantly cut the amount of miles floating around. I can’t imagine how many expired over the last few years. I am, unfortunately, the prime example of what they tried to achieve.

Reinstating Expired American Airlines Miles

Thankfully AA has a mechanism to restore lost miles, though at a rather significant cost. Depending on the number of miles you need to reinstate, you can pay a fee to have some or all restored to your account immediately. I decided to do just that.

We had 113,864 miles expire in this account. Here’s what AA charged to reinstate.

Let’s do a breakdown by cost per point:

• 5,000: 1.2 cents/point
• 10,000: 1 cent/point
• 15,000: 1 cent/point
• 25,000: 0.9 cents/point
• 50,000: 0.8 cents/point
• 75,000: 0.73 cents/point
• 100,000: 0.7 cents/point
• 113,864: 0.88 cents/point

You can see the cost per point went down unless I wanted all of them reinstated, which was presumably more expensive since it wasn’t in an increment of 25,000 miles.

I decided to reinstate 100,000 miles and give up the last 13,864. It was painful to give up those miles, but it was the right mathematical choice for me. Those last 13,864 miles would have cost an extra $300, or ~2.16 cents/point. That’s a lot, and usually you can buy AA miles for 1.75-2 cents/point a few times a year (if you buy the max amount of miles).

If you have to reinstate expired American Airlines miles, you might make some different choices. I decided to reinstate these miles even though I have no particular redemption in mind. If you’re planning on redeeming your lost miles and need every last mile, it will probably be worth it to buy those last few several thousand miles. Or maybe you just don’t want to buy any additional miles during a future bonus sale, so you decide it’s better to just get them all back now.

Summary

Look, reinstating expired miles sucks. You pay for miles you already earned or even already paid for once before. AA does it on purpose for situations exactly like the one I found myself in, and they got $700 cash out of me, plus deleted 13,864 miles from their books.

The best thing I can do now is make sure I use these 100K miles to get an extremely outsized redemption worth over 5 cents/point, like I did on my honeymoon.