Loyalty Points and a Widow's Interaction with Customer Service: What Happens When a Company Forgets the Human Behind the Account

A woman looks distressed while talking on the phone.

One of the ways credit card companies, airlines and other businesses build loyalty and keep us coming back is through rewards points that can be applied to future purchases.

The terms and conditions for these loyalty points tend to be multiple pages, highly confusing and often disguise nasty surprises in language that even lawyers have difficulty making sense of. Several have been criticized as being unfair and little more than a bait-and-switch.