Cathay Pacific Asia Miles: How To Extend Your Expiring Miles The Least Painful Way in 2022

It's been a while that I made new posts on this blog. The pandemic situation did not really make travel conducive and I like to keep the focus on giving actual DIY travel tips instead of cooking up random content just to keep viewership up.

But something happened to me in the last few days and the experience might be useful for others out there facing the same pain as me: Cathay Pacific Asia Miles expiry.

Cathay Pacific Airlines (Photo courtesy of Fasyah Halim from unsplash.com)

For the uninitiated, Asia Miles is the frequent flyer program of Hong Kong's flag carrier Cathay Pacific. The airline itself has generally been receiving good reviews. However, its frequent flyer program belonged to the headache-inducing type where miles would expire after X number of months, at least that was its previous policy. Then in Jan 2020, the policy changed and it became an activity-based system. As long you accrue new miles points or use existing miles, then all your remaining miles will get extended by 18 months. Sounds good right? Except those miles from the old system remained the same time-based expiry.

Pre-COVID, I had some travel plans and made a large sum of miles transfer from my credit card, to the tune of more than 200K. Then COVID came knocking on the door and plans came crashing down. Technically it was even worst for Asia Miles members because lots of Cathay Pacific flights would transit through Hong Kong, and as we know, the country has not been particularly welcoming to visitors or even transit passengers in recent times.

Last year in 2021, when I still had about a year away to miles expiry, there was a "2 partner challenge" program going on where a transfer of 3,000 miles from any 2 partner programs would convert all your existing miles to the activity-based type. The concerning step though was to first let your miles expire before having Cathay Pacific do the extension.

Fast forward to now March 2022, I have been trying to find means to use my points, even partner awards, but there was just no feasible way to make travel plans. Then, I stumbled upon Asia Miles' latest promotion, dubbed the Finance Points Conversion Mileage Renewal Offer, a mouthful for essentially converting your expiring miles to the activity-based system. The catch? You have to transfer 30,000 miles from credit card partners this time. Talk about inflation huh?

Photo showing the terms and condition of Asia Miles Finance Points Conversion Renewal Offer

Asia Miles Finance Points Conversion Mileage Renewal Offer

So is this conversion offer good? On paper, 30K miles to extend more than 200K miles does not sound too bad. On the flip side, who knows how long more would Hong Kong be in a limbo state? I would not have minded if it is just topping up 3000 miles, but 10x that when I already have so many points in Asia Miles frankly does not sound too attractive.

So I did the next logical step, calling into Asia Miles and mentioning my expiring miles. The agent knew exactly what was up and got straight to the point, offering to email another internal team to extend my points and that I could check the updated miles status in the portal within 24 to 48 hours. Wow, I could not believe my ears and confirmed that the miles would be switched to the new activity-based type.

Sounds great and now two days later, when I logged into check, the points did become activity-based. I am just glad I could extend the points with just a call - the least painful and definitely the cheapest (hey it's free!) way if you ask me.