Why United’s Mileage Pooling Feature Isn’t As Great As It Sounds

Sharing your points and miles with friends and family is a fantastic feature — especially when you can do it at no cost. Working together can help you book award flights you couldn’t afford alone. It’s like Voltron and Power Rangers for points and miles.

Some point-sharing options are better than others, and unfortunately, United’s Miles Pooling falls into this latter category. My wife and I recently used this feature for the first time, and it left a lot to be desired — especially when flights vanished while we waited for the pool to activate.

Here’s why I find this feature frustrating and how you can avoid some of the problems found in United’s Miles Pooling program.

What Is United MileagePlus Miles Pooling?

Last March, United introduced free MileagePlus pooling. With this feature, MileagePlus members can create a pool with their friends and family to combine their miles into a joint account. United was the first U.S. legacy carrier to offer this option. (Many international airline and hotel programs allow pooling rewards, too.)

The person who creates the pool becomes the pool leader and can invite others, and all members can decide how many miles they want to contribute to the pool. The pool leader can set limitations on which members can redeem miles from the pool. There’s no limit on how many miles can be combined into a pool or a minimum age to join a pool, but the pool leader must be at least 18.

There can be a maximum of 4 people in a pool. If a member in the pool has elite status with United Airlines, that won’t affect the pool or the other members. Elite perks can’t be shared through the pool.

What To Know Before Using United Miles Pooling

While sharing your miles with friends and family at no cost is great, my first experience using United Miles Pooling left a lot to be desired. To help you avoid the same problems I ran into, it’s worth highlighting the program’s pitfalls — especially the ones I didn’t realize in advance.

For context, I have United Airlines Premier Silver status, which can unlock discounted award rates when redeeming United miles. And since my wife and I each had roughly half the miles needed for a flight she wanted to book, our idea was to create a pool, redeem the miles from my account (at the lower rate), and list her as the passenger — if only it were that easy.

Delays in Using the Pool and Redeeming Miles

If you’re interested, you can create a pool with United first. That page lists some information about how the pool works.

Unfortunately, that page also buries some of the most onerous restrictions in the FAQs at the bottom. For example, we didn’t realize you can’t start using the pool immediately.

According to the FAQs, the pool leader can add miles to the pool immediately, though other members must wait 72 hours after joining a pool before they add miles to the shared balance. Once miles are added to the pool, no one can use them for 24 hours.

A lot can happen in those 24 hours. But award seats can definitely disappear in 72 hours. Since United Airlines doesn’t allow you to put award travel reservations on hold for free, you have 2 options: You can pay to hold the reservation so seats don’t disappear while waiting for your miles to become active or you can hope for the best in the meantime.

In our case, there were numerous seats and routes available, so we decided not to pay while enduring the 72-hour waiting period for my wife to be able to share miles into the pool. Of course, every seat in business class disappeared across route after route while we waited. Once the pool was active and she shared her miles, we learned about the additional 24-hour restriction. We decided to pay $9.99 for FareLock to hold the seat until the miles could be used.

This isn’t a user-friendly setup because it increases the chance that the flight you want will be gone by the time pooled miles become available. In contrast, other airlines offer instant transfers in their points pools, allowing immediate use and eliminating the risk of seats disappearing.

Pooled Miles Only Redeemable on United Flights

After the numerous routes and seats we’d looked at disappeared, we were ready to use our miles and started expanding the search. What about a positioning flight or flying to a nearby airport, instead of our home airport?

We found a solid option to get my wife to Chicago O’Hare (ORD) in business class with Copa Airlines, which is one of United’s Star Alliance partners. We could get her a cheap economy ticket from there to California. That’s when we ran into another problem: The payment page said we couldn’t use our pooled miles for that flight — though without any explanation.

I called United, and a friendly agent pointed me to the FAQs.

What can pooled miles be used for?
“Pooled miles can be used to book United or United Express award tickets only. Pooled miles cannot be used to purchase upgrades, seat assignments, onboard food and beverages, inflight Wi-Fi access or anything else.”

-FAQ on the United Miles Pooling page

Thus, you can’t use your pooled miles for anything but United flights. While not explicitly stated, this means you can’t use miles for partner award tickets. I had missed that key limitation.

Back to the drawing board, and we eventually had to accept an inferior routing with an extra connection in order to book a United-operated flight with miles from the pool. We also had to transfer extra points to United from Chase Ultimate Rewards because this inferior option cost more than our original, preferred flights that had disappeared.

Avoid These Common Mile Pooling Issues

There are positives to United’s Miles Pooling feature. There are also severe negatives. Let’s look at how you can avoid these problems if you’re using the feature.

Rely on Transferable Points

We could’ve saved time, points, and headaches by transferring Chase Ultimate Rewards points to United. All of that could’ve happened within seconds, and we could’ve booked the ticket we wanted right away.

You can share Chase points with a member of your household or send them to the rewards account (such as United MileagePlus) of an authorized user on your account. This is way quicker than United’s pooling capability.

Pay for FareLock

If you want to pool your miles with United, there’s a risk that award seats will disappear before your miles are ready for use. If you want to avoid that risk, you can pay for FareLock. It’s not free, but paying $9.99 for a 3-day hold can keep award seats from disappearing while you wait for miles to become available.

Remember that it takes 3 days after joining a pool before members can share miles. The pool leader can add miles immediately. No matter who added the miles to the pool, those miles can’t be used for 24 hours.

Therefore, it might make sense to create a pool now, just in case. That way, the only delay when booking an award would be the 24-hour period, which United’s cheapest FareLock option can overcome.

Use Other Programs

With all of its restrictions, avoiding MileagePlus Miles Pooling might be the best option. You can make award flight redemptions on United flights using points and miles from programs like Air Canada Aeroplan, Avianca LifeMiles, and Turkish Airlines Miles&Smiles.

Plus, pooled miles in other programs don’t typically require you to wait 24 hours before you can start booking flights.

Granted, United will offer more seats to its own members than it shares with those other programs. The silver lining, though, is that you can send points and miles into these programs from various credit card reward programs — often instantly — and avoid delays or restrictions imposed by United.

Final Thoughts

My first experience using United’s MileagePlus Miles Pooling didn’t go so well, and I likely won’t use it in the future. Now that we have the pool created, the 72-hour restriction won’t be an issue. However, that’s a significant obstacle for people creating a pool for the first time.

The 24-hour waiting period and the restriction on only booking United flights with pooled miles will remain. Other programs don’t have these same restrictions, and I’ll use those in the future — or just be willing to transfer more points from my bank to book a flight before the seats disappear.