A retired pilot who saved up about 100,000 Aeroplan points over the past 30 years lost them all ahead of his “dream vacation.”

Michael Lipp told CTV News Toronto on Thursday that he lost all his points in the spring of this year after his account was “inactive” for more than 12 months.

Lipp was a pilot for 39 years and said he was looking forward to a trip where he would be a passenger on the plane.

“To put it in perspective I think a domestic flight return (trip), business-class is around 25,000 (points) so something over 100,000, if one was wanting to take a flight, would be able to get possibly to Europe and back on business-class or economy for two people,” Lipp said.

“We (Lipp and his wife) were looking forward to that.”

Lipp said he had adhered to Aeroplan’s policy for the entire duration of being a customer, saying he had made at least one transaction per year in order for his account to stay active.

“I’ve had an Aeroplan account for probably 30 years,” he said. “In the process of understanding the status of my account with Aeroplan earlier this year – which was online – I found out that the statements had stopped in mid-March to April of 2017.”

“(I) investigated why because I wanted to understand the status of the points in uncovering why those monthly statements had stopped; we found out that the account had been made dormant in conversation with Aeroplan.”

A spokesperson for Aeroplan told CTV News Toronto that Lipp’s account was made inactive since his miles expired due to 12 months of inactivity and said they are unable to reinstate his miles.

Lipp said he missed the cut-off day by about a week and never received a notice about the expiration.

“They claim that there was a notice sent of the imminent expiry of the account and that was sent out on May 2,” Lipp said. “I went back obviously as everybody would and checked my mail right away but I had been getting the monthly statements regularly for years and years and years so there was really no reason why I wouldn’t get the notice of an account expiry.”

Lipp also confirmed he checked his junk inbox on his email.

After receiving a copy of the email Aeroplan sent to Lipp in the spring, Lipp said again he had “no copy of it whatsoever.”

Lipp said he wants Aeroplan to do something for him as his only option at this point is to buy back each of his points for one cent each.

“All I was told was is that there is no grey area in this and it was basically black and white and that the points were unrecoverable,” he said.

The program for people to buy back their points applies to inactive accounts of up to seven years.

When asked if being a pilot had anything to do with this incident, Lipp said “maybe that led me into some false belief, entitlement, I don’t know.”

This incident comes after Air Miles tried to expire their loyalty program last year, which was met with public outcry. New legislation was brought in to make the points never expire, which is not the case for Aeroplan points.