Want to share your miles with friends or family? Most airlines charge a hefty fee to make that happen. United Airlines will join the small population of loyalty programs offering a pooling option, allowing the sharing for free. And it is doing so with surprisingly few restrictions.
MileagePlus miles pooling further reinforces United’s position as the leader in family and group travel and gives our members more flexibility to use their miles while making it easier to connect to the destinations and moments that matter most, with the people that matter most.
– Luc Bondar, Chief Operating Officer of MileagePlus
Under United’s new MileagePlus pooling program anyone can create a group, with up to five total members (i.e. four additional participants). There is no requirement of any relationship between the members.
Each participant decides how many points to put into the pool. Once the points are pooled, the pool leader or any of the other four they designate can redeem pool points for an award.
When it comes to redemptions, points can still be used for anyone as the named traveler, just like with MileagePlus today. The passenger need not be a member of the pool.
Unfortunately – and this is a big drawback – the fine print says redemptions can only be made on United and United Express flights. That’s probably not an issue for most members, but when it comes to booking big-ticket trips it can be a huge deal.
A pool member cannot be evicted. They have to leave on their own, or the leader can dissolve a pool. When dissolved, any remaining pooled points are split evenly among the other members.
Members of a pool can leave whenever they want, but they cannot join a new pool for 90 days. Similarly, if a pool is full and one member leaves that fifth position is on hold for 90 days before a new member can join.
There is also a delay built in on redemption of points within a pool. For all members other than the pool leader a 72-hour cooling period must expire before points can be transferred in. There is also a 24-hour delay on redemption of points transferred into the pool. During that same 24-hour period the transfer can be reversed; after that the points are stuck in the pool.
These delays will certainly be frustrating to those trying to manipulate the program or use pools as a workaround for brokering points and other activities MileagePlus frown upon. Which goes a long way towards explaining why the rules exist.
Air Canada offered a similarly loose set of rules around Aeroplan’s family sharing option when it relaunched the program in 2020. Three years later the company suspended the creation of new sharing pools, citing fraud. Time will tell if United’s version faces a similar fate.
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