The Pluses And Minuses Of United's New One-Way Awards Bookings
If you followed our less than smooth attempts to book a European vacation last year, you'll know the staggering importance of one-way awards bookings. So useful is this option that at one point we recommended you make it a top criteria when choosing where to pool frequent flyer miles. It's great news, then, that United has followed American Airlines' May policy change and launched one-way bookings.
One-way awards are currently limited to online purchases, so you'll have to go to the Mileage Plus site if you want to book them. Customers are also limited to a single award level across their itinerary, and the only available levels are Saver Awards and Standard Awards. Stopovers are verboten, which has caused consternation in some quarters. Everything else works more or less how you'd expect: tickets are changeable but not transferable, Standard Awards give you more flexibility than Saver Awards do, and so on.
The new policy doesn't still take United up to American's level, since American lets you use miles to book one-way flights with their oneworld partners. United's one-way bookings are limited to United and United Express-operated flights. Hopefully this is a function of their online-only system rather than a long-term policy. Worryingly, though, a FlyerTalk post by United VP Robert Sahadevan very pointedly failed to raise the issue. He promised that two prominent restrictions - mixing and matching award levels and online-only bookings - would eventually be lifted. Nada on anything to do with partner airlines.
Still, at least they've got one-way bookings. Mileage Plus members can now get from here to there for as little as 12,500 miles. Baby steps.
[Photo: Magnus Manske / Wiki Commons]
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· Frequent Flyer Miles [Jaunted]
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