Expiring United Miles

scottishminnie

My husband and I both have around 50K each sitting in Continental onepass miles (or whatever United call them now). Mine have an expiry date of March 2015 so a bit of breathing space but hubby's are due to expire March 2014.


We don't intend to fly United again. We've switched to BA after several lousy experiences of UA service, especially on a business class journey so I'm kind of stumped on how to use them up.


The partner airlines don't work for me as we only fly Transatlantic and don't need any internal US flights for the foreseeable future.


I had thought I would transfer them over to hotel programs but that's only allowed for US residents.


Any thoughts on what to do - I'm reluctant to just let them expire. If they hadn't been such a bunch of unpleasant miserable sods we would still be flying with them .

Caz3121

Although you may not be able to transfer them to hotel programs you can book hotels with them - you should be able to get between 1 and 3 nights for £50k depending on the hotel

https://hotelandcarawards.mileageplus.com/travel/arc.cfm?nav=unitedmpEN&utm_source=loy&utm_medium=uacom_link&utm_campaign=3py&partner_category=redemption&partner_name=hotel_awards_2&asset_type=use_miles&asset_position=head&launch_date=2013-05-01

scottishminnie

Caz3121 wrote: »

Although you may not be able to transfer them to hotel programs you can book hotels with them - you should be able to get between 1 and 3 nights for £50k depending on the hotel

https://hotelandcarawards.mileageplus.com/travel/arc.cfm?nav=unitedmpEN&utm_source=loy&utm_medium=uacom_link&utm_campaign=3py&partner_category=redemption&partner_name=hotel_awards_2&asset_type=use_miles&asset_position=head&launch_date=2013-05-01

Unfortunately the hotel and car awards are not available to UK residents. When I try to search I receive an error message telling me I am ineligible and this is only available to US residents.

Caz3121

If you are on the global site it will say that but you need to switch to the UK site

Who is eligible to redeem for MileagePlus Hotel Awards?

• Hotel Awards are available to Premier members who in each case are also members with a MileagePlus account address in the following countries. Members must have sufficient miles in their MileagePlus account at time of redemption in order to redeem for the mileage portion of the transaction.

When you click on 'countries' you will see the UK listed

You need to change the top right hand corner to United Kingdom

ferf1223

it's probably of limited use to most but just in case...

we cashed in our miles for the same programme on points.com - we got over $700 of gift cards for US retailers for our points - can't remember exactly how many - which were about to expire (we also don't fly the airline anymore because of a series of poor experiences after several years of loyalty)...but we had the gift cards sent to my sister's address in the US...they wouldn't send them to the UK.

So only of use if someone a) has an address in the US they could have the gift cards sent to and b) if they had use of gift cards for US stores. For us it was absolutely brilliant, we still have a bit left on the last WalMart card and my hubby's tablet was paid for with a Best Buy gift card...points.com was mentioned on the Vegas thread here...we had actually forgotten we had the points and they would have expired not long after we did this so it was a nice surprise.

I was a bit wary of it but as the points were going to expire we tried it and redeemed those on one of our accounts first - then after the gift cards turned up with my sister we redeemed the rest.

Worth checking at least - it's free to join...some airlines will pay you via PayPal too - this wasn't one of the programs that offered that when we did it but it could have changed.

GRM

Donate 500 miles to a charity and the expiry date is extended in the same way as if you had earned additional miles - maybe useful in case there is a remote chance you might want to use them in the future.

Was excited when I saw they now allow personal transfers - and was ready to make you an offer to top up my 200,000 mile balance - but a cost of $405 to transfer 25,000 soon put paid to that idea :-(

http://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/mileageplus/transfer/default.aspx

scottishminnie

Thanks all. I feel a bit rude about not responding


I'm looking at what we can get for the 50k miles - looks like 2 nights up north (wisconsin, Iowa on our Sept trip) may be do-able but 2 nights in Naples, Sarasota etc over new Year is a non starter - in fact even one night is a no go then. Amazing how things are given a token value isn't it ?!