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One of the great features of Award Wallet is that it alerts you to when your airline miles or hotel points are about to expire.  I check the website pretty regularly, and also have the mobile app (because it also stores all of my frequent traveler numbers in case I need them while on the go)

(SEE ALSO: Track your miles with AwardWallet)

(SEE ALSO: How I got a million points (and you can too!))

la-quinta-points-expire-notice

la-quinta-points-expire-logoLa Quinta points expire: what to do?

I have stayed at a La Quinta hotel I think one time in my life, and it was many years ago, and I feel like it was so long ago that I either didn’t care about points (gasp!) or my La Quinta points expire a long time ago.

I have most (all?) of my La Quinta points from the “Play and Stay” game that they had back last January

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Ahhh good times!  I’m sure any of you who were around back then remember this!  It was right when PWaC first started, and I got 1 or 2 referrals (for bonus spins!) and it was the first time I realized that maybe there were actually some other people who were reading along!  I think that the marketing paid off at least for my kids, who STILL point out La Quinta hotels whenever they see them because of the Play & Stay game.

Anyways, I got 9000 points on my account and 2500 on my wife’s account, and since La Quinta points expire with no activity in 18 months, both of our accounts were set to have their points expire

What to do when La Quinta points expire

So first I looked for possible options to extend the life of my points.  The easy ones are:

  1. Transfer points from a bank transfer partner (such as Chase, American Express, etc).  Unfortunately La Quinta doesn’t have any of these transfer options
  2. Spend money with a co-branded credit card.  Again, I don’t have the La Quinta credit card, so that won’t work for me
  3. Buy something through a shopping portal.  I’d have done this but La Quinta is one of the few airlines / hotel programs that doesn’t have one.

I actually had earned 500 bonus La Quinta points a few weeks go by watching a 1 minute video

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But for some reason those points did not reset the expiration counter.

When La Quinta points expire: reaching out to Twitter

The next available options were things like buying gift cards (didn’t have enough points), or magazines (ugh) or buying points on Points.com (uhhh no).  So I reached out to @LQ on Twitter

(SEE ALSO: List of Airline and Hotel Twitter contacts)

They sent me a direct message asking for my phone number, and on Monday after the weekend I got a call from the LQ corporate office.  The lady shared some of the options I mentioned (magazines, Points.com, etc) and then said that she put 10 points in both of our accounts, which will extend their life for another 18 months!

So if your La Quinta points expire (or are about to), I definitely encourage you to reach out on Twitter to get your points extended!


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