We have some pretty great news coming from United which will make it much easier to pool your miles across different accounts and redeem them from one account. This probably won’t impact too many people, but for some this will be a much needed feature.

Mileage Pooling

Currently, Air Canada and British Airways both allow pooling of miles across multiple accounts for the purpose of redeeming miles. It is great to see United coming out as the first US airline with a similar option. This will allow up to 5 different members to pool their miles into one joint account.

Say a family of four who travels a lot have varying amounts of United miles in each of their accounts but want to book one award ticket for all four of them. Or, one of them doesn’t quite have enough to book their own ticket. Currently, they would all have to buy their own tickets and if one person in the family didn’t have enough they would need to buy the additional miles needed or transfer them from Chase 1:1 if they had the Sapphire Reserve or Sapphire Preferred. Now, they will be able to transfer all of the needed miles into one account and book all the tickets together.

With this new option, MileagePlus members will have the ability to join a group of up to 5 friends or family and add miles to a collective account. Each individual decides how many miles to add to the pool, but it will be up to the leader of the pool to decide how they are used.

The only downside I see to this is these pooled miles can only be used on United flights, so you can’t use them on any of their partner airlines. It would be nice to be able to pool your miles together for a flight on Lufthansa, but that is unfortunately not the case.

One extremely useful case for this is for families with children who have a small balance of miles in their accounts which otherwise wouldn’t be able to be used until they reached enough to book a flight. WIth this new pooling feature, one of the parents can pool the entire family’s accounts together to book award travel.

This will make United miles more useful in my opinion as there will be fewer “stranded” miles sitting in accounts that aren’t used as much.

This is Risky For United

One of the big risks in doing this is that some people will be tempted to sell their miles by adding someone to their Mileage Pool and booking them an award ticket in exchange for cash. There are also lots of shady “mileage brokers” out there that already do this which is extremely against every airline’s terms of service. I’ll be interested in seeing how this plays out long term and if anyone gets their accounts shut down for selling miles.

However, they put in place some rules that should help prevent this. First, if a member leaves a pool, they cannot join another one for 90 days. Additionally, that pool cannot have a new member join for another 90 days.

Wrapping Up

United is launching the ability to pool miles between up to five members accounts. This will be especially useful for families where one member has more miles in their account than the other and they want to book everyone’s ticket together.

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