Category Archives: United Airlines

I received the targeted email offer below from United (check your inbox!). In short, fly 1 round trip before July 15th and earn 5,000 bonus miles. Fly 2, get 10,000 miles. Fly 4, earn 25,000 miles. It says it’s only available to the recipient, so unfortunately I don’t have an offer code to share.

Promo is only good on tickets booked after you register and flights must be completed by July 15th. Flights July 3-5 don’t count. Flights also must be on United or United Express metal (codeshares operated by other airlines also don’t count).

United is offering a deal where you can purchase miles from them for 40% off the regular price through the end of the day today (April 25th). Through this link you can buy miles at 2.25 cents a piece (ie, $225 for 10,000). I’m not sure why you would do this, but if you needed to buy United miles to top off an award (and assuming you had none to transfer from Ultimate Rewards), this is better than paying full price.

I’ve been trying to book a trip to Maui for the 4 of us using United miles, and I wanted to share a little tip:

Hawaiian Airlines (a UA partner) doesn’t make 4 award seats available between Kahalui, Maui (OGG) and Honolulu. That was causing a problem for me getting back from Maui (I wanted to connect in Honolulu to the Newark or Washington nonstops rather than having a short overnight flight to the West Coast).

There is another option that I wanted to pass along: United also partners with Island Air, and Island Air has several flights a day from Kapalua (on the West Coast of Maui, close to the hotels at Kaanapali) to Honolulu, and there is wide open availability for award travel back to Honolulu (5k miles each way) and a good connection back to Honolulu for those East Coast long-hauls. If you’ve tried to book a family trip, you may have run into the issue with Hawaiian Airlines trying to grab 4 award seats. This is an easy way to avoid that.

I’m going to Australia next month, and I’ve booked the trip on Air New Zealand in Premium Economy (yes, I’m traveling for an extra 6 hours instead of flying on Qantas because of the miles, sue me). I called United today to upgrade the trip using United miles. I learned 2 things I thought I would share:

1) I know that you can only upgrade Star Alliance partner flights from coach to business if you booked in Y or B class. I was hoping that I could upgrade Premium Economy classes as well, and that perhaps they’ve just never adjusted their rules since ANZ added Premium Economy. Answer? You can’t upgrade Premium Economy classes (A or O, in Air New Zealand’s case) using miles.

2) More importantly, my Auckland-Sydney flight is in B class, so it is upgradable. But the United rep told me their systems for upgrading partner flights using miles “has been down for 6 weeks.” Has anyone else encountered this? 6 weeks?

United announced that it will end Newark-Copenhagen service in September (the route will still be served by fellow Star carrier SAS) and, more surprisingly, Dulles – Accra service in June.

Loss of any service to Africa is a bummer (though I believe there’s more service from the US to Africa today than there has been since the Pan Am heyday.) I would’ve thought the IAD-ACC route made a ton of sense, with a huge West African population in the Washington, DC, area. But, I would guess, without onward traffic from ACC, perhaps the market is too limited. I don’t know – this really seemed like a route with possibilities. Anyone have any ideas why they’re abandoning?

1) I left the W Lakeshore at exactly 5:30am and was AT MY GATE at O’Hare at 5:55am. It’s like we skipped some time-space continuum.

2) Because of the warp-speed taxi ride I stopped by the gate of the 615am (!) flight to LaGuardia (I’m on the 7am). There were seats available, but the gate agent told me it would be $75 to get on the flight. I said that I was Platinum and I believe the fee is waived (as it was waived the prior day when I moved up to the 7am from a later flight). He said that the fee is only waived for 1K and Global Service. The United webpage suggests I am correct. I wasn’t about to argue at 555am about a flight that gets in 45 minutes earlier, but I’m curious – who was right?

A United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Shanghai turned into a long ordeal for passengers on Sunday when they found themselves stuck in Anchorage for an unexpected 2-day stop.

A few hours into the flight, crew (and passengers, I guess) discovered that several of the lavatories on the plane did not function. Pilots landed the plane mid-afternoon in Anchorage to fix the issue, but after several hours – when passengers were not permitted to deplane – it was determined that the aircraft could not be repaired.

At 8pm passengers deplaned, but they then waited 2 hours for meal and hotel vouchers, by which time airport restaurants were closed.

A new plane was flown in the next day, but after passengers boarded the crew found mechanical issues with that aircraft as well. Everyone was sent back to their hotels to wait it out another night.

A third plane was sent up to Anchorage on Tuesday, and the 777 was able to get everyone back on their way to Shanghai.