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The United MileagePlus program has had a miles pooling feature since early 2024, but it has always had a restriction that limited how useful it actually was. In unexpectedly good news, that restriction has now been lifted, and the feature is significantly better for it.
[HT: Travel On Points]
The change
Since United launched miles pooling, members have been able combine their miles into a shared pool, but miles from the shared points pool have only ever been redeemable for travel on United itself. If you wanted to use those miles for travel on partner airlines you were out of luck.
Amazingly, this is no longer the case and pooled miles can now be redeemed for award travel on any of United’s partners, which includes the full Star Alliance network.
How the pooling feature works
United is the only one of the big three US carriers to offer miles pooling, and the pooling feature is straightforward (I’ll write a full article on this soon, but this is what you need to know for now).
- Pooling is free of charge.
- Any MileagePlus member over 18 can create a pool through their MileagePlus account.
- The head of the pool can then invite up to four other MileagePlus members, of any age, into the pool as long as they each have an active MileagePlus account.
- There’s no cap on how many miles can be pooled.
A few things worth knowing before you dive in:
- Pooled miles can only be used to book through united.com or the United app
- Members can leave a pool at any time, but any miles they’ve contributed stay in the pool and are forfeited by the person leaving (which can be painful!)
- If you leave a pool, you can’t join another one for 90 days, and your old pool can’t add a new member for the same period.
Link to the MileagePlus miles pooling page.
Quick thoughts
I have to admit to being more than a little surprised to see United being this generous (it’s not in the airline’s nature), but this is excellent news for United’s flyers and even people like me who rarely fly with United at all but, somehow, are part of a pool with a good number of miles in it.
I’m part of a MileagePlus pool with over 200,000 miles sitting in it and the restriction that limited me to using these miles on United Airlines flights alone has been a pain in my rear end for longer than I care to admit.
With the “United Airlines flights only” restriction lifted, my options are widened considerably, and with an Asia/Southeast Asia trip coming up next year (a region where Star Alliance carriers are plentiful), I may finally be able to use some of the United Miles that I’ve been sitting on for far too long.
Bottom line
United MileagePlus has expanded its miles pooling feature so that pooled miles can now be redeemed on partner airlines and not just on United metal and it looks like the full Star Alliance network is now on the table for redemptions.
All the other rules remain in place, so there continues to be no cap on the number of miles that can be pooled, and that means that we’ve just seen a genuinely meaningful improvement made to United’s miles pooling feature.
The feature was always a good idea in principle, now it’s much more useful in practice.
