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United miles have just gotten some major upgrades!
1. You can now book one-way Star Alliance awards for half the miles of a round-trip award. Previously United only allowed one-way awards for travel on United, but now you can book one-way travel on any of the 28 Star Alliance carriers!
This means that if you have AA miles and United miles for example that you can use AA miles and book one-way on any of the OneWorld carriers or on other AA affiliated carriers and the other way using United miles for Star Alliance carriers.
For example let’s say you want to go nonstop from NYC to Tel Aviv but El Al only has availability to Tel Aviv but not back to NYC and Continental only has availability for the return flight. You’ll now be able to just use AA miles for the outbound El Al flight and United miles for the return flight on Continental!
2. When AA introduced one-way awards they completely abolished round-trip awards. All awards are now priced as one-ways. The huge disadvantage in this was the loss of a free stopover, which is a huge benefit on a mileage ticket. A stopover allows you to go to 2 cities for the same amount of miles. (AA’s OneWorld round-the-world chart awards do still allow for stopovers) So the gain of One-Way awards on AA was a loss to many who liked the free stopover.
So far it seems that United will still allow you to book a Round-Trip award and get a free stopover. So you have the option of going one-way without a stopover or a round-trip with a stopover. Hopefully they will continue to allow this which may even put pressure on AA to bring back the free stopover!
3. United previously did not allow you to change a Star Alliance ticket after departure. Once you used a segment on a ticket you couldn’t make any changes. They have now eliminated that requirement so changes are now permitted on a return segment even after departure!
These are all excellent changes. Hopefully as the United-Continental merger moves forward they’ll keep making positive changes to their already excellent programs and they’ll easily become the premier mileage program in the world.
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2 Comments On "United Mileage Plus Improvements!"
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This worked to my favor, I was booking a Roundtrip to Tel Aviv with AA, they require 90k miles. I have 2 accounts each with around 77k (which I got from the recent citibank promo). I did not have the opportunity to generate the additional 15k miles in either account. Instead of a round trip, I booked 2 one way tickets for 45k each. Now I have 30k in each acount, and I can slowly genrate more miles toward my next Israel ticket, or use it for a domestic ticket. The only drawback was I had to pay twice the $20 telephone bookking fee, once for each ticket, (I know I could have booked online and avoided the ticketing fee,but the avaibilty was sketchy, and I allready had a reseveration for one leg of the flight that was no longer available). At the end of the day I am sending my mother to Isreal for Chanuka for $98, with El Al on a direct flight, on the preferred times and days. Thanks Dan.
One quick question, do you think with the recent laws passed in congress, with regard to credit card processing, the credit card reward mileage days are over?
Its a given that UA will allow changes to OW awards after travel. Is it only for date and time ? How about changes to Flight and/or routing ? For example, if I am flying NRT-LAX on SQ, can I change to NH on the same route ? thx.