In 2024, the United MileagePlus program introduced a great feature, letting members pool their miles. This initially came with some major restrictions, and we’ve just seen the most limiting of those lifted. That’s something to be excited about.
Continue reading: Kudos: United MileagePlus’ Miles Pooling Feature Gets Even Better
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
This is great news. I found the soft spot for UA miles are partner rewards on short haul flying (10K miles on intra Europe with LH Group, 12.5K miles on domestic Australia with VA and sometimes even 5K miles on domestic Japan with NH)
UA can also occasionally be a good deal if a United card member redeems from their account. For example, my wife holds the Quest card and we were able to book United Polaris from IAD-HNL for 45k miles each from her account with the discount she got for holding the card. Was much cheaper than what I would have paid had I booked from my own account since I don't have any United cards. It has to be UA metal though so unfortunately pooling wouldn't be helpful if you're planning on booking a partner flight and hoping for the discount. Hopefully some day they'll change terms to include them.
This is overdue. I didn't realize the original restrictions - I had to undo the entire miles pool which was painful because I couldn't book tickets that involved a partner, even just a connection on a partner even with my own miles. That was incredibly stupid. Now they finally fixed it.
This is good, but it can be even better. JetBlue and Aeroplan still have the least restrictive family pooling of any program (earn together, spend together, no nonsense). Alaska is odd, tied to if you have their credit cards, like Summit. Why American, Delta, and others don’t have anything yet is appalling and cheap of them. @Tim Dunn, what gives! Let us pool our SkyPesos with our familia, bro!
What are you talking about? There's no fee to pool miles...
I've used mileage pooling with United and there was no fee to set up the pool nor to redeem the miles.
Did you read the article? They just removed that limitation which is literally what this post is about... You can now redeem on partner flights so the UA metal restriction has been lifted.
I would agree it's a nice program feature to have overall - but the use cases are more narrow than some might imagine. It's basically useful if you have family members who will never earn enough miles to book their own trips, OR you want to book an award trip with everyone on the same PNR instead of booking separate reservations and don't have one account with enough miles.
Outside of those two scenarios (which are mostly applicable to families, rather than just couples), it's generally easier to just use one person's miles or book tickets separately. Even in IRROPS, you can work with the airline to accommodate you together despite being on separate tickets so I find it's usually ok to just book separately.
I will say, I appreciate that they have the restrictions they do (I think it takes up to 24 hours for miles to deposit, there's a waiting period after creating a pool, etc. etc.) because I'd much rather they have those restrictions in place, than allow things to happen too quickly and open the program up to fraud. It just means mileage pooling isn't the right solution if you have a trip you want to book right now, and you already found the flight availability - because once you create a pool and deposit miles, that pricing could be gone.
Did you read “my” post? Apparently not because if you did you’d realize I was talking about using the card discount on partner flights. The card discount does not work on partner flights, pooled or not. They did not remove that limitation.
Nice. Now if I could find partners seats. Or better yet, UA seats on partner sites! Cmon UA!