A few days back, Lucky from One Mile at a Time posted a good article on some ways to keep your Aeroplan Miles from expiring. While we respect the hell out of Lucky and the OMAAT team, the article missed out on the easiest way to keep your miles from expiring.
Aeroplan Expiry Policy
As most of you know, Aeroplan’s expiry policy is actually pretty good in comparison to some others out there. Your miles only expire if you have 12 months of inactivity, meaning that any activity in your account renews your miles for another year.
Some Ways to Renew Your Miles
As Lucky correctly identified in his article, there are quite a few ways to earn or redeem your Aeroplan Miles, all of which will renew your balance for another year. These include:
- Present your Aeroplan card when making purchases at affiliated retailers including:
- Home Hardware
- Costco
- The UPS Store
- Primus
- Novus
- Car rental agencies
- Almost every hotel chain
- Shop at the Aeroplan eStore
- Donate miles to charity
- Redeem for travel or merchandise
But the Easiest?
The dead simplest way to earn miles to keep your account from expiring is to allow Aeroplan to text you.
All you need to do is to update your profile with your cell phone number (this should work even if you are in the US).
Once you are sure your cell phone number is in your profile and saved, wait a full 24 hours (to allow Aeroplan’s systems to catch up) and then simply send a text message to 27767 with the word “JOIN” in the message.
You’ll receive a text message confirmation that your opt-in has been received and another one when your points have been deposited (about 24 hours).
If you’re lucky you may even earn up to 1,000 Aeroplan Miles for your efforts but it’s most likely that you will earn 100 Aeroplan Miles.
The great thing is that you can opt-out at any time and those 100 Aeroplan points, although only worth about $1,00, are enough to keep your miles from expiring for another full year.
That’s easier than finding a retailer that accepts Aeroplan (more and more rare these days) and much less costly than redeeming your miles for something you don’t need.
Does It Work?
Absolutely it does, but keep in mind that the SMS opt-in bonus will only be in effect until December 31, 2019.
Conclusion
Having miles expire sucks but in the case of Aeroplan, the solution is very quick and simple (and free). Simply opt-in to Aeroplan’s SMS service and your problems are solved – at least for another year.
There is even one or two better ideas. If you live in BC (or can use a VPN to simulate living in BC) you can sign up for Carrot which is a site sponsored by the BC Government that is trying to raise health awareness in Canadians. You get a survey (or small lecture about good health) every week or so and earn 5 Aeroplan Miles per visit. My wife has earned hundreds of miles doing this. But even the 5 miles for one two minute survey gets you an annual renewal.
The other obvious way is to have an aeroplan visa card (CIBC) but this must be covered ad nauseum elsewhere.
I tried texting 27767 and I received back an error message?
From US, doesn’t work due to number. “Message sent using invalid number of digits. Please resend using 10 digit number or valid short code.”. Can you find the right number? I could really use this tip!
Thanks for this, since my Aeroplan points was due to expire in two weeks; with Esso pulling out of Aeroplan, and none of the existing partners interesting, I needed a way to keep the points active, and this was it.
Despite the screenshot showing the bonus program expiring at the end of 2018, it still seems to work. Here’s a direct link:
https://www.aeroplan.com/SMS.do
Did not work for me from US
I know this thread is a little older, but wanted to report that I tried this with a T-Mobile number from the USA, and it did not work (I got a message of “Service Access Denied” when I tried). However, I found an alternate method which hopefully will reset Aeroplan account expiring miles – I transferred points using the website points.com from my “Speedy Rewards” account to Aeroplan. This is the reward program from Speedway Gas Stations. There was not a minimum number of Speedy Rewards points required to make the transfer, which makes this a relatively painless transfer.