3/26/2024 UPDATE: Functionality has been restored. You can access the tool to pool your United miles here.
Has anyone done this? How smooth was the process for you?
United Airlines Suspends Pooling Of MileagePlus Miles, Blames Technical Glitch
3/22/2204 UPDATE: After briefly being available last night, this program has been temporarily suspended. United told Live And Let’s Fly:
We experienced some unexpected technology issues overnight and look forward to bringing back our new miles pooling feature soon.
We will update this story when functionality returns.
United Airlines now allows you to pool your MileagePlus miles with family and friends in order to book award travel, but with one catch.
Pool Your United Airlines Miles With Family And Friends At No Cost For Redemption On United + United Express Flights
News broke yesterday that United Airlines would be the first US carrier to introduce family pooling of MileagePlus miles. Now United has confirmed that and provided official details.
Starting today, you can share miles with family and friends for mileage redemptions on United and United Express flights.
Any MileagePlus member over 18 years old can become the pool leader and create a pool for free when logged in to their account on United.com.
- Pool leaders can invite up to four of their family, friends, or close travel companions of any age to join the pool if they have an active MileagePlus account (there is no minimum age to join MileagePlus)
- When logged in to their MileagePlus account on United.com, members will be instructed on how to contribute miles to the group pool as well as how to redeem pooled miles
- There are no limits to the number of miles that may be contributed to an active miles pool
- Pooled miles can be used when booking a ticket on United.com or in the United mobile app
To be clear, the catch is that these pooled miles can only be used for redemptions on United Airlines or United Express flights, not partners like Air Canada, ANA, Lufthansa, or SWISS. While pooled miles cannot be used for partner flights, creating a pool does not prohibit you from redeeming miles for those outside your pool, even using pooled miles.
United cites a 2023 U.S. Family Travel Survey (81% of parents report intent to travel with their children in the next year and nearly 60% report concern about travel affordability) as the basis for this change.
Lu Bondar, Chief Operating Officer of MileagePlus, explained:
“We’re always looking for new ways to provide the most value to all of our loyalty members and are proud to be the first major U.S. airline to allow our members to pool their miles with their loved ones and friends. MileagePlus miles pooling further reinforces United’s position as the leader in family and group travel and gives our members more flexibility to use their miles while making it easier to connect to the destinations and moments that matter most, with the people that matter most.”
Contributing miles to a MileagePlus miles pool will not affect Premier status. Only members who travel on a ticket using pooled miles will earn any eligible Premier qualifying points (PQP), not the member who contributed them. Members cannot pool PQP, Premier qualifying flights (PQF), PlusPoints, or TravelBank cash, only miles.
CONCLUSION
While the restriction to only redeeming miles on United or United Express flights somehwat limits the value of this new initiative, United’s robust worldwide route network still provides options on five continents for redemptions and now makes it easier than ever for family and friends to share miles.
Finally, initiatives like this also present fraud opportunities (the buying and selling of miles is a massive underground business). It will be interesting to see what sort of security mechanisms United will have in place to prevent this sort of thing. Air Canada has suspended its family mileage pooling over fraud concerns. Hopefully United can avoid them…
This would be awesome on Delta. They have miles that never expire so my kids have lots of miles sitting on their accounts that they never use.
So, this is the end of being able to use United miles for any partner flights, period.
Once they are able to differentiate pooled miles, and prevent those from being used on partner flights, then it’s inevitable that the same “feature” will be rolled out for all awards booked with United miles. 100% guaranteed.
Quite the “enhancement.”
I think that’s a stretch. And I am the worst curmudgeon ever as to these “programs.”
Hmm, Jetblue has a family pooling plan that I’ve been enrolled in since 2018. Not sure how United are now the first? Unless you read it literally that United is the first US carrier to allow pooling of “MileagePlus Miles” rather than points on Jetblue??
They said first “major” airline.
Agreed though that Jetblue has had this feature for a long time and it’s been invaluable for our family. I can understand why United doesn’t want to include partner airlines in this, but still, it’s a great feature.
Regarding “fraud” and “selling miles”. That’s always something that can happen. Ahem, I happen to know someone who… used miles to get a united flight for a (dear) friend and then asked her to pay him back.
What I think will happen more, and this isn’t a bad thing, is I have in-laws with small account balances, such as 10K or so, which have sat there for years and now can be utilized by pooling. Get 5 of them together and we can cook with gas.
Or have a road warrior father, road warrior father in law, road warrior wife, and close friend road warrior pool their 3 million miles together and get one business class award seat….oh
Emirates has had it for a while. I tried this with them pooling family members and it was clunky at best. And confusing. I’ll wait to see and listen and hear what others have to say before even embarking on trying.
British and Virgin had this many (10+) years ago
Yes, but with British you can only book family members…not anyone outside.
@Stuart @Matthew: off topic but main headline on the MN paper. The pathetic City Council will now reconsider their decision against Uber and Lyft. LOL! When they realized that Uber and Lyft were really leaving the city they walked back. What a bunch of losers.
Beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick if it works.
Limiting pool miles to redemptions on UA is definitely a negative, but with the past change that makes UA metal redemptions eligible for PQP earnings I’m not sure this catch is all that major. For me that change alone makes UA currency only usable for UA redemptions; I’ll stick to AC for *A.
How often are people getting outsized value with redemptions on UA metal? I’m sure there are a handful of good redemptions, but with dynamic pricing and no partner access, most of the fraudsters’ motive is gone.
Overheard late last night at United’s crack IT war room following the enhancement rollout:
“Hey, people are actually using this and are now able to redeem for a decent award flight!”
“What? That’s not supposed to happen! Something’s wrong – pull the plug!”
Enhancement has been disabled. Now it’s back to requiring 450,000 miles to get a business class award seat to Bangkok, with 3 stops, and 42 hours enroute, routed via Newark, Ethiopia and Bangladesh. FIXED!!!
@ Matthew — It’s kinda ridiculous that you can’t use your pool to bock partners.
@Bupkiss
My options were IAHMLE – 505K, 41h of flying, a change of airports –
IAH LGA /surface/ EWR DXB MLE
2nd option… SQ was worse 295K via MAN & SIN! Can’t remember flight time but the MLE arrival time was 23:00hrs can’t get to a resort until 3 days after your first flight.
Yep, that’s United MileagePesos for ya.
You are clearly playing the game all wrong. Just an fyi. Or you are not in the game enough to play it. But that’s absurd. You have MLE options galore. Think positioning flights to gateways. Transfer miles to other programs to get QR. Get a flight to Europe with points and buy or use points for a separate record to MLE (prices are cheap in premium cabins from Europe).
There are countless options. Best is to wait until a week before and you will find many seats open up in premium cabins. Unless during a holiday the always open. And If you can’t? Well, just buy economy and suck it up. You need to be a little Vegas or accept the absurd rates otherwise.
Lol this is how SkyPesos apologists sound like
Really? I have no real love of any of them, lol. I could care less and UA is the same as the next guy. I am just trying to help someone see the realities and work the system better.
The FAA is finally cracking down on WOKE united and their trainwreck of an airline.
Stupid comment as usual.
General observation from the tech world:
For the past 20 years, management styles in tech have been about cutting costs to the bones including for cybersecurity. There’s a term for it “vaporware”. The Obama healthcare website notoriously crashed despite costing 1.7 BILLION dollars. Note: Back in the old days, when white guys with pocket protectors built these things, a website such as this would have cost a few million at most (in today’s money). It wasn’t a rocket science website: Collect some data, query a database, and submit the data. They didn’t do websites on the mainframe (that stuff was so bulletproof it caused a problem that it wouldn’t go away) but rather the basic servers of the time were still dirt cheap.
I bought a Japanese made Mazda for a reason. Americans (or those the CEO/CTOs contract out to) aren’t making stuff so well anymore.
I wrote websites such as this on my own for about $100K a year in today’s money. BY MYSELF. In a few months. A team would crank out something professional with about 10 folks at most including the graphics artists.
I shall be retiring outside of the USA. Now I know how Russians felt in 1990…
Seems like it’s back https://www.united.com/en/us/mileageplus/miles-pooling
United brought family pooling back now, after having pulled it once this month. Let’s see how long it works this time.
I signed up on Friday, then the site shut down. Yesterday I added my wife to our pool. Today it still says I need to wait 72 hours before adding or redeeming miles, but at least it remembered our pool.