The agency behind the Air Miles program has cancelled a plan that would have seen reward points older than five years expire, but lawyers involved in a class-action lawsuit say there is more work ahead.

The company backed off from a previous decision that would see Air Milles in over 11M accounts expire if they weren’t used in five years due to excessive pressure from consumers.

The expiration date was set for the end of this month.

Customers are happy that it never got to that point, while others are frustrated with the turnaround, saying that they never would have used up their points earlier this year had they known the company was going to change its mind.

A man in Red Deer has gone so far as to launch a class-action lawsuit against the company.

He’d been collecting since the 1990s, saving for a dream vacation to the South Pacific, but then rushed to use his accrued miles once he heard of the expiration plan.

Lawyers connected to the lawsuit say that while the expiration date has been shoved off, there is more work that need to be done.

“We are going to work with the representative plaintiff and other class members that we’ve heard from to determine what this means for the class action and we’ll work forward from here. In the meantime, it will continue but, as we’ve said before, this is a good first step,” said said Andrew Wilson, a partner at JSS Barristers, the Calgary law firm handling the proposed class action.

The agency behind the Air Miles reward points says it made the decision to roll back the plan because of proposed government policy to prevent the expiry of reward points.

Members are now able to continue to use the miles in their Dream balance, primarily for travel and gifts, without fear of losing them.

The Air Miles program also includes a Cash balance for every account that customers can redeem for instant cash savings in-store or for gift cards. Points in the Cash balance were not going to expire regardless of the company’s decision.

Dream Miles already collected in customer accounts cannot be transferred to Cash accounts, but customers can contact the company to change their preferences on what type of reward points they want to collect as they shop.

For more information on the Air Miles program, visit the company’s website.

The company says that over the last four years, point collectors have received over $2B worth of value.