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United Airlines has joined up with BP to offer MileagePlus members a new way to earn miles when they gar up at the pump and, if you have more miles than you know what to with, you can now spend United Miles at BP gas stations too.
How Much Can You Earn?
MileagePlus members can earn miles at the following rates:
- One award mile for every gallon of fuel purchased
- Two award miles for every gallon of fuel purchased with a linked debit or credit card
- Three award miles for every gallon of premium-grade fuel purchased with a linked debit or credit card
How Many Miles Can You Spend?
MileagePlus members can get a discount of 50 cents per gallon of fuel by spending 60 miles per gallon.
Essentially this means that MileagePlus members would be getting approximately 0.83 cents of value per mile spent…and that’s not a very good rate at all.
Considering it’s often remarkably easy to get over 1.0 cent/mile in value out of MileagePlus miles when they’re spent on airfare, 0.83 cents/mile in value is a poor redemption.
How Do You Sign Up?
There are a few stages you need to work through to sign up for this offer:
- You’ll need to have a MileagePlus account (sign up for free here)
- You’ll need to have a BP Driver Rewards account (sign up for free here)
- During the sign up process you’ll have the chance to select MileagePlus as your earning option
- You will also be given the opportunity to link your MileagePlus account to your BP Driver Rewards account
- At the bottom of the BP Driver Rewards sign-up form you should link a credit card (preferably one that earns bonus points/miles for gas purchases like the Citi Premier credit card). According to the BP T&Cs you can link up to 5 credit cards to your account.
That’s it. You’re ready to earn miles when you gas up your vehicle at BP gas stations.
Thoughts
If you don’t fly with United very often, have no interest in accumulating any more United Miles but have somehow amassed a small number of miles that you haven’t been able to use, this could be a good way of using them up and saving some money at the same time.
If you don’t fall into the category above then, unless you have more United Miles than you can possibly spend on airfare, do not redeem them for a rate as low as 0.83 cents each – that’s just an all around bad deal.
BP fuel rewards normally offers drivers 10 cents off a gallon for every $100 spent on fuel at BP (full T&Cs here) so you need to weigh up the value you can get from that (or from any other gas promotion for that matter) before deciding if the MileagePlus earnings are worth it to you.
