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When United Airlines sells its miles with a 100% bonus (the best bonus the airline offers) the cost per mile usually comes to somewhere around 1.88 cents. Unfortunately, anyone wishing to buy miles at that price usually has to buy at least 40,000 miles – smaller purchases come at a higher cost/mile – but, for a limited time, there’s now a way to generate as few as 8,000 United Miles at just 1.86 cents each.
Stack Deals To Generate United Miles At 1.86 Cents Each
Right now, the Choice Privileges loyalty program and United Airlines are running two separate deals that, when stacked, will allow you to generate United Miles at just 1.85 cents each.
Deal 1 – Buy Choice Points
Through 31 August, the Choice Privileges program is selling its points with a discount of up to 25% and as long as you buy at least 16,000 points, you’ll be locking in the best deal on offer.
In the current sale, Choice Privileges is allowing members to buy between 16,000 and 180,000 points with a 25% discount and whether you buy a low number of points or the maximum allowable, the cost per point remains constant:
Buying 20,000 points for $148.50 or 180,000 points for $1,336.50 would both see you buying points at ~0.74 cents/point.
Deal 2 – Convert Choice Points To United With A Bonus
Choice Privileges and United MileagePlus are partners and, ordinarily, you can convert 5,000 Choice Points into 1,000 United Miles. This is a terrible deal that most people should be avoiding at all costs.
Through 31 August, however, United is offering a 100% bonus on transfers between Choice and the MileagePlus program which sees the transfer ratio improved from 5:1 to 5:2. This is still far from a great deal if you’re simply converting hard-earned Choice Points, but it’s a lot more interesting if you’re making the most of the current points sale.
If you buy 20,000 Choice Privileges Points for just $148.50 (as shown above), you can now convert those points to 8,000 United Miles. Effectively, you will have just purchased 8,000 United Miles for $148.50 which makes the cost per mile approximately 1.86 cents.
Because, as I’ve already shown, the cost per Choice Point remains constant for purchases of between 16,000 and 180,000 points, it’s possible to generate up to 72,000 United Miles at just 1.86 cents per point.
A Quick Further Thought
I’m not attempting to suggest that at a cost of 1.86 cents per point this is a fantastic deal that everyone should be jumping on. This is certainly one of the cheaper ways of buying United Miles that we see but unless you have an immediate use for any miles that you generate and you can see that by generating miles at 1.86 cents each you’ll be saving cash, this isn’t something I suggest that you do.
On the flip side, however, if you are just a few thousand miles short of being able to book an award with the miles you already have in your MileagePlus account, stacking these two deals could be an economical way to topping up your account to get you that award.
I’ve don’t ever recall seeing United selling 8,000 – 39,000 miles at a cost of just 1.86 cents each so from that point of view this is definitely an interesting (if niche) opportunity.
Bottom Line
Stacking the current Choice Points sale and a transfer bonus that’s in place through the end of August makes it possible to generate United Miles at 1.86 cents each. If you still need a lot of miles to book your next award this probably isn’t the best way to go about getting them (unless cash fares are high and awards are available), but if you’re just looking to top up an account with a few thousand miles, this could be worth considering.
[…] This is good news for anyone who doesn’t need the full 175,000 miles but needs over 72,000 miles (if you need between 8,000 and 72,000 miles, there’s a limited-time opportunity to generate the…). […]