You almost certainly have loyalty points sitting somewhere right now. An airline account you have not opened since a flight last year. A bank rewards balance you have never once checked. A supermarket card in your wallet that you tap out of habit and never think about again.
Most of that balance is not lost yet. Some of it is closer to disappearing than you think, and there is usually no warning before it happens.
Why Loyalty Points Expire At All
Every loyalty program needs a rule for when unused points come off the books. Left unmanaged, a program's outstanding liability grows every year, so almost every program, airline, bank, or retail, sets some kind of clock. The two most common versions:
- Rolling inactivity expiry. Your points expire a set number of months after your last earning or redemption activity. Every new transaction resets the clock, which is exactly why long-dormant accounts are the ones at risk.
- Fixed calendar expiry. Points earned in a given period expire on a fixed date regardless of activity, common in some retail and card schemes.
Neither version is unreasonable on its own. The problem is arithmetic, not intent: one program with one clock is easy to track. Six to ten programs, each with its own clock, its own rules, and its own definition of "activity," is not a tracking problem a person can solve by remembering harder.
How Much Is Actually At Risk
This is not a small, personal inconvenience. It is a measurable, national-scale number.
Expires across UAE loyalty programs every year
Based on the UAE loyalty market's estimated total value and a conservative 15% breakage rate, the industry term for value that is earned but never redeemed. Sources: ResearchAndMarkets (2024), McKinsey.
Breakage is not evidence that any single program is designed against you. It is what happens, at scale, when the number of programs a person holds outpaces the attention any person has left to give them. The UAE holds one of the highest loyalty program densities in the region, more airlines, more banks, and more retail schemes competing for the same wallet, which is exactly why the number is this large here specifically.
The AED 800M+ figure is not spread across a few unlucky people. It is spread across almost everyone who holds more than two or three programs, in amounts too small to notice individually and too large to ignore in total.
Expiry Patterns By Program Type
Exact terms vary by program and change over time, so treat the figures below as a starting map for what to go check, not a substitute for reading your own program's terms. That caveat is itself the point of this section: nobody should have to memorise this.
Airline miles
Most UAE-based and international carriers use rolling inactivity expiry, commonly in the 12 to 36 month range depending on the program, reset by any qualifying transaction. Airline programs also frequently run a separate clock for tier status miles, which lapse on a fixed annual date regardless of your redeemable balance. The two are easy to confuse and often catch frequent flyers off guard.
Bank and credit card rewards
Card-linked points typically expire annually, on account closure, or on a fixed multi-year cycle set by the issuing bank. Because these points accrue passively on ordinary spending, they are the easiest balance to forget entirely, nobody opens a separate app just to check reward points on a card they already use daily for other things.
Retail and supermarket points
Retail and grocery loyalty schemes vary the most: some run rolling inactivity windows as short as 12 months, others tie expiry to a calendar year. These programs also tend to have the lowest per-visit point values, which is exactly why they are checked least often and expire most quietly.
Telecom and other everyday programs
Telecom loyalty points and similar everyday-spend schemes often carry short rolling windows, since the underlying spend is frequent, the expiry clock is usually short to match. A single quiet month is sometimes enough to trigger it.
The pattern across all four categories is the same. None of them are unusual on their own. The risk comes entirely from holding several of them at once, each with a different clock, none of which send a clear warning before the deadline passes.
Why Six To Ten Programs Is The Real Problem
The average UAE resident holds six to ten loyalty programs across airlines, banks, and retail, and actively manages fewer than three of them. That is not a personal failing. It is what happens when every bank, airline, and retailer you interact with hands you a separate program, and none of them talk to each other or to you about the others.
Eight Programs, Eight Clocks, One Person
Say you hold an airline program, two bank card rewards accounts, a supermarket card, a coffee chain app, a pharmacy card, a ride-hailing points balance, and a hotel program. That is eight separate expiry rules to track, in eight separate apps or statements, none of which cross-reference each other. Checking all eight manually, every month, is not a realistic habit for anyone with a full-time job.
This is the actual mechanism behind the AED 800M+ figure. It is not that people do not care about value they have already earned. It is that no single person can hold eight different expiry calendars in their head at once, and no program is incentivised to remind you about a balance sitting in a competitor's app.
The Three-Minute Check
You do not need a new system to reduce your risk today. You need three minutes and a list of every program you actually hold.
List every program you hold, including the ones you have not opened in months. Most people can name three or four immediately and forget two or three more until they check their wallet or inbox.
Search your inbox for each program's name. Expiry notices, when they exist at all, usually arrive by email and get buried under everything else. A quick search surfaces any warning you already missed.
Open each app or account directly and check the balance and expiry terms yourself, rather than trusting a notification to arrive in time. For the accounts you have not opened in over a year, do this first.
Note which ones use rolling inactivity expiry and make one small qualifying transaction if a balance is meaningful and the account has gone quiet, this alone resets most inactivity clocks.
This manual check is worth doing today regardless of what you do next. It is also, exactly, the check that becomes unnecessary once every program you hold sits in one place with its own expiry clock tracked automatically, which is the specific problem MYLO is built to solve.
The Bottom Line
Loyalty points are not a permanent balance sitting safely until you decide to use them. They are a perishable asset with a clock attached, and the more programs you hold, the more clocks you are quietly responsible for tracking. None of this is any one program's fault. It is what happens when six to ten separate systems all assume you are watching, and none of them are watching each other.
MYLO brings every program you hold, airline, bank, retail, and more, into one dashboard, shows the combined value in dirhams, and tells you exactly when something is close to expiring and what to do about it. You add each program by scanning your card, never by connecting a bank account or handing over a login. It costs nothing to see where you stand.