While frequent travelers wanted to know how hotels were going to treat their most loyal customers with top tier status, that wasn’t important to me. I don’t have any statuses that I earned by staying at hotels. The only perks I get are by having a co-brand credit card. It’s one of the great things about not being loyal to one hotel chain.
Instead, I needed to worry about my points expiring due to inactivity. Hotels will generally take away your points if you don’t have any activity in your account for 12-24 months. Under normal circumstances, that’s not a problem. However, with us not traveling for months, or maybe the better part of this year, we’d find many of our account balances in jeopardy.
I was glad to see that the hotel chains understood this problem and have extended the expiration dates of their points. Some chains might need to extend even longer but for now here are the extensions that the hotel chains have put in place. The links for each hotel chain will take you to their COVID-19 information pages.
Marriott Bonvoy
Normal point expiration – 2 years
To provide you ample time to redeem points, the expiration of points will be paused until February 2021. At that time, your points will only expire if your account has been inactive for at least 24 months.
IHG
Normal point expiration – 12 months
For all members with points due to expire from April 1 through to the end of the year, we are extending the expiration date of points to December 31, 2020. We’ll be contacting members with more information.
Hyatt
Normal point expiration – 24 months
We are suspending the forfeiture of points through December 31, 2020. As a reminder, our general policy is that points do not expire, but they will be forfeited if a member’s account is inactive for 24 months.
Hilton
Normal point expiration – 12 months
We will pause the expiration of all Points scheduled to expire between now and December 31, 2020.
Wyndham
Normal point expiration – 18 months
We are pausing the expiration of any Wyndham Rewards points scheduled to expire between now and May 31, 2020.
Choice Hotels
Normal point expiration – 18 months
Specifically, we have paused points expiration until May 31, 2020 allowing Choice Privileges members more time to redeem points and achieve greater flexibility when planning future travel.
Radisson
Normal point expiration – 24 months
Radisson Hotels is suspending its point expiration policy by six months, effective March 1, 2020.
Best Western
Best Western points never expire, there was no need to issue a point expiration extension.
MLife
We don’t want you to miss out on redeeming any Points or Express Comps that may expire during the closures. As a result, we have suspended Point and Express Comp expirations through September 30, 2020.
Final Thoughts
Marriott Bonvoy is the most generous of the programs, extending points until February 2021. The other major hotel companies extended points thru the end of 2020.
The lower tier hotels, like Choice and Wyndham only extended point expiration until May 2020. I’d be willing to bet that they’re going to have to extend that date a while longer.
I was glad to see that every program has come out with a plan for their members. While it’s important to take care of your loyal members by extending status, you can’t forget about the people who only stay with you once or twice a year. Keeping that business is going to be important and it’s not worth losing a customer because you canceled their account in the middle of a global pandemic.
#stayhealthy #stayathome #washyourhands
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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
