April 11, 2024
United Allows Miles Pooling
Pam
Big news for those who fly United Airlines—United now allows miles pooling! This is especially beneficial if you are traveling with someone with elite status who can book a better seat. For instance, I am Platinum Elite on United. My daughters and I are planning a trip this summer to Portugal. There is a very reasonable flight from the Azores all the way to Denver (with a stop in EWR) for only 40K United miles. I can book myself and up to 5 other people in an Economy Plus seat, so this works great for my daughters to send me their miles while I do all the booking.
This is also helpful if a couple wants to travel together and one person doesn’t have enough miles for a ticket, but another person has more than enough. By pooling their miles, they can both go.
In the past, you could transfer points to someone, but there was a fee to do so. This is a major advantage that I am so happy about.
How Pooling Works
This new feature can be used by friends and family alike. As long as you are a United MileagePlus member, you can pool miles with other members. Groups of up to five people can now share redeemable miles and apply the miles towards the price of an award ticket. There is no limit to the number of miles any member can contribute to an active miles pool.
One person has to be designated the leader, and they can invite up to four people to join the pool. The leader must be at least 18 years old.
First, visit the miles pooling home page, sign in, and select “Create a pool.”
Information will pop up about who can be in the pool and who can be a leader. Once you agree to the MileagePlus miles pooling terms and conditions, you can start your pool. On the next screen is where you start adding members.
The pending member has to accept the invitation to be added to the pool. The image below shows how it looked once my husband accepted the invitation to join my pool. Once members are successfully added to a pool, they can begin adding miles to the pool and redeeming miles from the pool.
This shows that my husband and I can now pool points. Yay!
Members can only participate in one mile pool, and when a member departs from a pool, they lose access to the miles in that pool. Pooled miles can be used to book United or United Express award tickets only. Pooled miles cannot be used to purchase upgrades, seat assignments, onboard food and beverages, inflight Wi-Fi access, or anything else.
Interesting Things to Note
- There is no age restriction on members signing up for a MileagePlus account and earning miles, so even young children can pool their points with their parents, making it easier to book trips for a family.
- Once you transfer points to the pool, you cannot book flights with the points for 24 hours. Within that 24 hours, you can cancel the transfer.
- If you don’t book points within 24 hours, they will be stuck in the pool and can’t be transferred out.
- If a member leaves a pool, they can’t take unredeemed miles that were initially contributed — they’ll stay in the pool to be used by the current pool members.
Bottom Line
United now allows miles pooling, which has made it much easier for family and friends to travel together. I have United elite status, so it is nice that my daughters can pool their points with mine, and I can book Economy Plus seats for all of us. What are your thoughts about this?
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FYI: One thing I learned the hard way about pooling is you can only book (with pooled miles) on flights operated by United or United express. 😩 the first leg of the flight I wanted from Geneva to SFO was operated by another airline so a pop up said “not bookable w/ pooled miles”
Thanks for sharing, we’ll add that to the article!
I’d love to see this article updated once you have made a redemption as there are some sticky rules not explained in this article that would be helpful to know.
For example, once you transfer points to the pool, you cannot book flights with the points for 24 hours. Within that 24 hours you can cancel the transfer. Once the 24 hours is up the points are stuck in the pool – you cannot transfer them out. If you cancel a flight that was booked using pooled miles, those miles return to the pool and remain there until someone in the pool uses them.
This created a bit of an annoyance for me – I transferred the needed points to the pool and when I returned 24 hours later to book the flight, the flight cost had changed. Luckily in my case it went down, but annoyingly that left nearly 5k points in the family pool when my intent was to drain the pool to 0. (I was trying to use up the miles my mom had banked with United).
Furthermore, people can leave the pool, but if you dissolve the pool, the balance of points will be distributed evenly among the remaining members, even if they never contributed points.
Thanks for your experience – I’ll update the article right now.